If you listen carefully, you can hear two distinct sounds — one of anxiety, the other of laughter — coming from Washington, D.C. Each is muffled but not very well.

The first is of timorous Democrats promising to keep the federal government shut until Republicans add $700 billion more to the national debt. They want to hang tough, but they know they are between a rock and a hard-left place.

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The second comes from President Donald Trump and Republicans stifling guffaws as they watch their opponents present them a political gift that will allow them to ax government bureaucrats faster than they’d hoped.

The shutdown began at midnight on Oct. 1, following the last tick of the clock in fiscal 2025, because Democrats refused any money if the GOP didn’t extend COVID emergency subsidies and let illegal immigrants go on Medicaid.

This mess is happening because the Democratic Party is hopelessly split. Its leftists on Capitol Hill and its radical base around the country demand fights over anything and everything Trump and Republicans try to do. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is terrified of defying them because the last time he did so, in March, when he voted with Republicans to fund the government, outraged radicals called for his head. So now he has led — by which I mean followed — his hotheads into a government shutdown.

The Democrats’ big problem and his in doing this, however, is that the shutdown allows budget director Russell Vought, chief financial axman now that Elon Musk is back in the private sector, to sack federal workers more freely than he could when Washington was still running.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the Wall Street Journal that Vought “has been thinking for his entire life and career about how to downsize the government,” and the Office of Management and Budget director met for talks with Trump on Oct. 2 to plan where the ax would chop first and where it would go next. You can forgive Johnson for his tactful shading of the truth when he also said, “The president takes no pleasure in this. The president did not want a shutdown.”

Really? One supposes that’s true to the extent that Trump and the Republicans would have preferred the disarrayed Democrats to undergo a Damascene conversion to fiscal responsibility and agree to vote in favor of the budget already passed by the House. But now that this miracle has failed to materialize, how can the administration not grin? Now that Schumer has led his leftist lemmings off the cliff, it would, in the adapted words of Oscar Wilde, “take a heart of stone to read the death of Little [Chuck] without laughing.”

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Schumer is already feeling pressure, not least from Senate staffers working all around him. They were due to get paid on Friday, Oct. 3, but now their checks will not come until the shutdown is over. Will their boss allow the shutdown to drag on so that his aides’ second paycheck goes missing?

Two Democrats, Sens. John Fetterman (PA) and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), plus independent Sen. Angus King (ME), have already voted with Republicans to fund the government. It will take only four more Democrats to peel away from Schumer under Republicans’ constant pounding before the shutdown itself gets shut down.