Trump news: Things are going off the rails. It's time for Mayor Pete to step in.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Related From Slate Turns Out Everyone Was Wrong About the “Resistance” to Trump This Time Potentially impacted activities, according to early coverage, include cancer research, disaster reconstruction, meal deliveries to homebound seniors, and child care at facilities that receive Head Start funding—but one of the big problems at the moment is that even experts aren’t sure what the two-page Office of Management and Budget memo announcing the “pause” means. In a case of solid comic timing, the shutdown news began to spread at about the same time that NBC News was going live with a piece on congressional Democrats’ plan to ignore the “noise” that Trump’s boundary-pushing generates in order to focus its rhetoric instead on issues like “the cost of living,” “border security,” and “community safety.” Suffice it to say that staying chill and talking about “community safety” might not be what Democratic representatives’ constituents need or want from them right now. Until the general public gets mad about what is happening, moderate Republicans are not going to worry about losing the next election because they shut down cancer research in order to investigate whether it supports “Marxist equity” and “transgenderism.” But the public can’t get mad about what is happening until it finds out what is happening, something that is increasingly hard to count on in an era of fragmented, partisan, personality-driven media. As secretary of transportation, part of his job was to explain why and how federal regulation of the aviation industry could make the average person’s day-to-day life better—although, in the case of air travel, maybe the way to put it is “make the average person’s day-to-day life less of a nightmare.” This is pretty much exactly the skill set needed to explain on television and social media why something called “impoundment” involving “the Office of Management and Budget” is an urgent concern.