Today, Americans awoke to what can only be described as political surrender by Democrats. We’ve seen it called everything from capitulation to buckling to caving. And what we’ve heard from party faithfuls is full-on fury.

You can hardly blame them. Only days after finally seeing some daylight in big election wins over Trumpism, a small group of Democratic Senators and one Independent seemed to have suddenly lost their nerve and raised the white flag to Republicans as a way of ending the shutdown.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is taking most of the heat, even though he isn’t one of the small group that sided with the Republicans. Some Democrats in Congress are saying he has “failed to meet the moment.” More are suggesting he resign immediately for not maintaining party unity.

Let’s hold on and take a steadying breath.

To understand what happened in Washington on Sunday night, you must recognize one immutable fact: the president was never going to negotiate. This is a game to him. The suffering of the citizenry is just part of his playbook.

The principle of least interest holds that the person who cares least in a relationship has the most power. That is Donald Trump in a nutshell. His repellent disregard for anyone but himself gives him power. It makes him a dogmatic opponent, one with few ways to leverage.

Make no mistake, the senators’ capitulation was a hit to the solar plexus for anyone hoping to stop the president’s full-tilt dismantling of the American political system. However, all is not lost.

After 40 days of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, a group of senators decided to defect from their caucus and negotiate with Republicans to end the shutdown. In exchange for their votes, they got, well, squat:

• Furloughed federal workers will be rehired. They and those working without pay will get back pay. Incredibly, this had to be negotiated even though it is the law.

• They were promised a mid-December vote on extending the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) insurance subsidies. On the plus side, it will be a public reminder that Republicans are fine with premiums skyrocketing for millions of Americans. But the December Senate vote will have no teeth because the House will not bother calling a vote.

• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides money to hungry Americans, will restart and will be fully funded through fiscal year 2026. So, even if there is another shutdown, which could happen at the end of January, SNAP is safe. Well, safe-ish, since the president’s July spending bill cut the program by $186 billion over ten years.

That’s it. The deal essentially maintains the status quo, while not actively helping the millions of Americans whose lives and financial security have been upended since Inauguration Day.

Historically, to win a shutdown fight, one party must: blame the other — check; make it about a popular issue — check; make the political pain acute enough to make the other side cave — check (sort of). But these rules apply in normal times. We are not in normal times.

Polling shows that people blame the president and the Republicans more than the Democrats for the shutdown. More importantly, the president’s approval ratings, one of the only things he seems beholden to, took a nose dive.

Making the shutdown about the cost of health insurance was a good idea and a strategy that worked for the Democrats in 2018, helping them recapture the House. But this time it wasn’t as cut and dried. Some had a hard time connecting the dots between ending insurance subsidies, premium increases, and shuttering the government.

For an ordinary politician, the pain inflicted by the shutdown would have been more than enough to end it, much less force him to come to the table. But, as we have been saying for months, nothing about any of this is ordinary. Not only did the president refuse to negotiate, he used hungry Americans as political pawns.

What the acquiescence of these eight Senators came down to is this: the president’s willingness to inflict pain was greater than their willingness to see their constituents struggle.

They did not believe continuing the shutdown would ever lead to extending the Obamacare subsidies. Ultimately, they did it because they were worried about the American people. Three hundred thousand of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine’s constituents work for the federal government. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto said she had never witnessed so many Nevadans in line at state food banks.

Also, six of the Senators who caved are not up for reelection, the other two are retiring.

In addition, if the shutdown continued, they argued, there was a decent chance Trump would have bullied his party into nuking the filibuster, one of the only current levers in place to stop — or at least slow — the worst of the president’s policies.

Though it might be hard to distinguish the sliver of a silver lining from the very dark cloud it borders, you actually don’t have to look all that hard to find it.

For the first time since taking office chinks can be seen in the president’s teflon-like armor. Besides his poll numbers plummeting, the results of last week’s election were a bigger rebuke of him and his policies than expected. Democrats and independents became more engaged and enraged as the shutdown persisted.

Trump’s draconian and cruel doubling and tripling down on blocking SNAP payments may be his undoing, or at least hurt his party’s chances in 2026 and 2028. Shutdown polling took a turn against the Republicans when the president decided to withhold those funds.

A look at Google search metrics during the shutdown show a modest and short-lived interest in ACA premium increases. But searches for SNAP were ten times higher than usual and increased as the shutdown dragged on.

The issue of skyrocketing insurance premiums is going to get worse, much worse. Those who can least afford an increase could see their premiums jump by 114%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Millions are expected to drop their insurance because they won’t be able to afford it. There is sadly no doubt that people will die because the president was unwilling to keep Obamacare affordable.

In a surprising twist of political fate, ending the shutdown with no deal on the Obamacare subsidies could mean a shellacking for Republicans come next November. There will be no cover, nowhere to hide, when most Americans are paying considerably more for health insurance. Just a reminder: every House seat and a third of the Senate seats are in play in the midterms.

Standing up to the president and forcing the shutdown was the first true show of strength from a party that has struggled against a man who plays by no rules and cares only for himself.

For Democrats, the only way out of this mess is to fight through it, and the only way through is together. Unity is not a hallmark of the Democratic Party. But if the shutdown has taught them anything, it’s that the only way to withstand this presidency is by standing together.