Is Trump’s brinkmanship backfiring?

“Drip, drip, drip.” That, said David Leonhardt in The New York Times, is the sound of President Trump’s approval ratings steadily dissipating as a result of the longest government shutdown in US history. The crisis began last month when Trump, egged on by right-wing pundits, refused to sign a government funding bill on the basis that it didn’t provide the $5.7bn required for the building of his famous wall on the Mexican border. This, in turn, prompted a stand-off with the Democrats, who now control the House of Representatives, and the partial shutdown of the government. For a month, around 800,000 federal workers have either been furloughed or have been working without pay. Trump has previously taken proud ownership of the shutdown, but the clash is “not going well for him”. Polls suggest that most Americans blame him, rather than the Democrats, for the crisis; the stand-off is knocking 0.5% off his job approval number each week, according to one pollster.

Trump may be losing the battle over the shutdown, said León Krauze on Slate, but his “nativist rhetoric” is still hitting home. Some 42% of Americans now support the building of the border wall, up a full 8% on a year ago. The share of Americans who “strongly oppose” the construction, meanwhile, has dropped from 52% to 38%. So Democrats had better beware of dismissing public concerns about immigration. Trump is playing the long game, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. He’s hoping that, by the next election, people will have forgotten the shutdown, but will remember that he staged a big fight over the border. But he may be misreading public attitudes. After all, he made immigration a central plank of his midterm election campaign, and while that pleased his base it had a “disastrous impact on the wider electorate”.

The big question now, said Mckay Coppins in The Atlantic, is how this shutdown is ever going to end. Trump has “dug in”, threatening to prolong the stand-off for “months or even years”; Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat House speaker, has likewise insisted that she will never back down. Her party may have public opinion on its side; but equally, the president is determined not to disappoint his base. If you speak to congressional staffers off the record, they say they fear that “there may be no way out of this mess until something disastrous happens”. They raise various “macabre hypotheticals”, including a big food safety scare resulting from a lapse in inspections, or even a plane crash caused by a stressed-out air traffic controller. The general consensus is that “the current political dynamics won’t change until voters get a lot angrier”.