As President Trump’s shutdown gamble appears unlikely to secure funding for his border wall, and as Democrats are poised to take control of the House, allies of the president say he may have to act alone.
“I have a hard time believing that the base will turn out at 2016 levels in 2020 if the central promise of the campaign is not fulfilled,” a source close to the White House said.
The president made repeated promises during the 2016 campaign to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border — one Mexico would pay for — and he has continued to demand Congress over the first two years of his presidency provide the money for it.
Congress, however, has bucked the president’s $5 billion request, one that will be made more difficult to fulfill once Democrats take control of the House in January.
That could put the president in a precarious situation for re-election in 2020 as he tries to reinforce his base.
“These people want to see a fight. They want to see an actual effort,” the source close to the White House said. “I think most Trump voters can understand that the numbers are against us. But they want to look at Trump and the administration and the Republican Party and see them fighting for the wall the same way they fought for [Brett] Kavanaugh.”
The fight over Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court showed voters what it looks like when Republicans punch back, the source said.
“If they don’t see the same effort for the wall, you better believe they’re going to be deflated,” the source continued.
Trump seemed to signal a willingness to fight when, during a meeting in the Oval Office in December with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., he said he would be “proud” to take responsibility for shutting down the government over border security.
But as Congress hurled toward a partial government shutdown last month, Trump tweeted it was Democrats who would “now own it.”
The source close to the White House said for Trump, there “has to be follow-through.”
The source continued: “If you’re saying you’re going to shut down the government over the wall, then you better shut down the government. That’s how you deflate people when you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it.”
For Trump, mounting a fight over wall funding through the spending bill, then, “may be the last chance to show his supporters that he’s willing to go to the mat for this.”
As Congress approached the deadline to pass a government spending bill, allies in conservative media and on Capitol Hill ramped up the pressure on Trump to follow through with his demands for $5 billion for the border wall.
Conservative columnist and author Ann Coulter, who wrote a book called In Trump We Trust, warned last month she wouldn’t vote for Trump in 2020 if he didn’t build the wall.
She also professed in a blistering column for Breitbart that “one of two things is true: Either Trump never intended to build the wall and was scamming voters all along, or he has no idea how to get it done and zero interest in finding out.”
The pressure appeared to work. The president torpedoed a Senate-passed spending bill because it didn’t include money for the wall. Instead, he forced the House to include $5.7 billion in a spending measure, though it lacked the support to clear the Senate.
As a result of the impasse, a partial government shutdown took effect Dec. 22, leading Trump to cancel plans to spend Christmas at Mar-a-Lago and remain in Washington, D.C., where he continued to hold firm on his demand for wall funding.
“I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” Trump tweeted on Christmas Eve. “At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!”
But the president and other top members of his administration have indicated they’re expecting a prolonged shutdown.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to be open. I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it,” he told reporters at the White House on Christmas Day.
White House budget director and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, meanwhile, did not rule out the shutdown continuing into January.
While Trump and the White House have put the onus on Democrats, the president’s congressional opponents pinned the blame for the lapse in funding on Trump.
“Instead of bringing certainty into people’s lives, he’s continuing the Trump Shutdown just to please right-wing radio and TV hosts,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement just before Christmas.
The Democratic leaders accused Trump of “plunging the country into chaos.”
“As long as the president is guided by the House Freedom Caucus, it’s hard to see how he can come up with a solution that can pass both the House and Senate and end his Trump Shutdown,” Schumer and Pelosi said.
But Trump’s continued insistence that a spending measure include funding for his wall has earned him praise from his conservative allies.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a member of the House Freedom Caucus who met with Trump at the White House just before Christmas, described the president’s attitude as “resolute.”
“He’s in this for the long haul, and he is not going to sign a bad deal that does not include border security with a physical barrier,” Gaetz told Fox News in an interview.
Gaetz said $5 billion, as Trump has demanded, is the “right number.”
Many believe the government spending fight before Christmas marked the last time Trump could secure the $5 billion for the border wall, though even the president acknowledged doing so would require backing from several Senate Democrats.
Pelosi has stressed on numerous occasions her party would not support legislation that included funding for Trump’s border wall.
But the new installation of a Democrat-controlled House should not deter the president from acting unilaterally, some say.
“When you have national security concerns like we have now and something that Congress seemed, on both sides of the aisle, not to want to do their jobs, the president is the commander-in-chief,” Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign official, said. “His No. 1 responsibility is to protect America’s national security, particularly the homeland. It’s not protected every day we don’t have that wall.”
Nunberg said it’s “high time” the president find a way to pay for the border wall, even if it means taking money out of other agency budgets and facing subsequent court challenges.
“Obama showed leadership, the wrong kind of leadership, when he did DACA before the 2012 election. George W. Bush showed what he thought was leadership when he said he supported a ban on gay marriage and would support a constitutional ban, and that’s what the president better do,” Nunberg said.
Some of the president’s allies believe it’s time for the president to take a page out of his predecessor’s playbook.
“I think Trump supporters look at what Democrats do when they’re in power. They look at the fact that Obama was willing to swing for the fences, whether it was DACA or gun control or Obamacare,” the source close to the White House said. “He did not care about some of the blow back, some of the negative. I think in a lot of ways, Trump supporters want to see the same type of fight from Trump.”
Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said it’s a “missed opportunity” for Trump not to have secured funding for his border wall when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, but said reforming the immigration system requires more than just a wall.
O’Connell also contended that a major factor playing into whether Trump wins re-election in 2020 will be if he can avoid economic downtown.
“The irony is, even if he got the $5 billion, he still has to keep focus on this issue for the next two years and rub a rabbit’s foot and hope the economy doesn’t tank,” he said.
