If the White House accepts last night’s tentative budget deal, President Trump will be accepting less money for border security than it could have gotten before the partial government “shutdown” began Dec. 22. The deal thus would represent a hugely embarrassing defeat and expose President Trump as a singularly ineffective negotiator.
Forget “the best deals.” This is, for a modern American president, the worst capitulation.
The proof is in multiple news accounts in the days before and immediately after the shutdown began late last December. All along, Democratic leaders had said they would not fight $1.3 billion “as an extension of existing funding levels.” Then, as the original December deadline loomed, there was “the $1.6 billion that Republicans and Democrats had floated as a compromise before the shutdown began.” That money would not explicitly have required the money to be used for a wall, but it would not have forbidden such use.
That last amount, reported in multiple places, was directly confirmed by incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., on Dec. 4. That tentative agreement was abandoned once the White House rejected it as entirely inadequate.
The deal reached last night would provide $1.375 billion. In other words, Trump not only failed to win the $5.7 billion he demanded, and failed to land funding roughly halfway between that and the $1.6 billion Democrats had offered, but actually secured $225 million less than he could have gotten in the first week of December.
In the meantime, taxpayers will fork over $9 billion in back pay for federal employees, roughly half of which is for work that wasn’t being done. Thus, Trump engineered a political showdown in which taxpayers paid $4.5 billion for nothing, and lost all sorts of services in the meantime, while he achieved $4.3 billion less in wall funding than he had demanded. And that doesn’t even include the two million federal contractors — private entities, not federal employees — who lost paychecks during the shutdown.
The overall economy, meanwhile, lost some $3 billion in economic output that will not be recovered, and economic growth for the quarter will probably be half a percentage point lower than it otherwise would have been, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The whole country suffered losses as a result of the shutdown, while gaining nothing. And for Trump, there was no art to this deal. Instead, it was abject surrender.
