President Trump proudly owned the longest government shutdown in history. He said as much long before the shutdown even started, choosing the time, place, and manner of this battle. For 35 days, 800,000 federal employees went unpaid. That was 35 days of private businesses seeing their revenues crashing, markets balking, and our economic growth possibly grinding to a halt. The shutdown caused billions of dollars lost in economic output and the direct waste of back pay for furloughed federal workers who got paid to do nothing.
Trump said he secured a deal, but make no mistake: this concession is anything but. In a war of his own choosing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not only won, but managed to subvert the obvious narrative that she abdicated her responsibility to negotiate and govern.
Democrats made it clear they weren’t there to play. Any other president would have stormed cable news, vociferously demanding that Democrats name their price and making it abundantly clear that in exchange for the wall, he would make one of the Left’s greatest wishes come true. After all, Democrats spent the better part of a decade swearing that they’re the party of so-called “Dreamers”! Luckily they have a president finally willing to entertain legal and constitutional amnesty for Dreamers in exchange for an itty, bitty $5 billion drop in the multi-trillion dollar federal budget.
But our president has no focus. It took him nearly a month to make a clear and obvious offer to compromise, and all of the bells and whistles of his former friends’ legal woes have distracted him from what could have been a compelling narrative.
With all due respect, Mr. President, you have to put up, or shut up. If the wall isn’t happening, you ought to say so now so Ann Coulter can launch her presidential exploratory committee. But he won’t. And why? Because he needs to put on a show.
Kurt Schlichter has extolled Trump as an “avatar of our collected resentments,” a phrase which perfectly gives the lie to the true impulse behind Trump’s most ardent base.
He’s no policy wonk, dealmaker, or master manipulator. But that’s because he doesn’t have to be. With the exception of an idiotic few, no one in his base ever actually believed that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. It was simply a phrase designed to outrage, designed to provoke.
Trump only had to prove his willingness to fight. “Lock her up”? The Department of Justice is a part of the executive branch. If Trump really wanted to put Hillary Clinton back under investigation, he could request one today. But that was never a serious proposition. It was simply a call to arms.
We might get a billion dollars here or a billion there for some utterly uncontroversial and sensible border security under Trump’s tenure. He’ll still steam and fume and masterful kabuki theater, bellowing to the skies loud enough that his base hears his rage and shares in it with him. But the glorious wall as a concrete fact isn’t happening, at least with Pelosi in the driver’s seat.
But at least he fights.
