President Trump hits a wall
On the Shutdown Dustup
President Trump appears to have peaked: He is about to lose half the Congress, the authorities are closing in, and his top (if not only) candidate for chief of staff turned down the job. What he has chosen to do with his last few weeks at the likely height of his powers helps explain how they waned so quickly.
In a strange televised donnybrook with Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on Tuesday, Trump said he would be “proud” to shut down the government he nominally runs, demanded $5 billion to build a border wall he falsely characterized as already being built, and acknowledged that the border he wants to fortify at such great cost is secure.
Trump turned a well-worn kind of Oval Office photo opportunity — the exchange of bipartisan pleasantries for the cameras before the real negotiating starts behind closed doors — into an argumentative spectacle fit for reality television. And he ignored the first rule of shutdown politics that was being carefully observed by Pelosi and Schumer — blame the other party — by agreeing with them, saying, “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.” This was certainly Trump upending Washington conventions as promised. But to what end?
It’s an inopportune moment for the president to publicly threaten “Chuck and Nancy,” as he calls them, with the prospect of holding up spending bills due next week. Trump admitted he would need several votes from Schumer’s Senate Democrats to pass funding for his “Great Wall” (if he can get it through a Republican-controlled House that, as Pelosi noted, has been far from unanimous on the issue). Pelosi, meanwhile, is positioned to become Trump’s most formidable foil after her party enjoyed its most convincing gains since Watergate in the chamber that holds the power to impeach.
Moreover, Republicans’ total control of government, and the president’s explicit acceptance of responsibility for any impasse, all but eliminate the chief political drawback of a shutdown for Democrats: the possibility that the public might blame it on them.
Beyond the puzzling politics of the Trump shutdown, as Pelosi branded it, are the policy problems. Illegal entries from Mexico had fallen to what government research estimated was a four-decade low when Trump took office. Even in attempting to make a case for a wall, Trump said on Twitter and in his back-andforth with the Democrats that the border is secure.
While recent months saw a surge in migrants arrested or turned away at the border, it’s been driven by Central Americans seeking asylum under U.S. and international law, not by attempts to defeat border security. A medieval fortification is about as effective an answer to that problem as it is to the illegal drug trade and terrorism, both of which Trump has speciously cited as justifying the multibillion-dollar project.
Trump’s return to the paranoid roots of his presidential campaign will no doubt please a remnant of the minority that fueled his ascent. But hobbling the government in their name would only accelerate his decline.