America took a chance. At least some Americans took a chance. Donald Trump had never held political office before. Everyone knew that. His grasp of how our government (or any government) works was a few steps below rudimentary. Everyone knew that too. He had no experience in foreign policy, other than with the intricacies of resort and hotel development in far-off lands, and with the issues involved in staging a beauty pageant in Moscow – and he had no military experience, other than high school at that military academy for troubled rich kids prone to bullying. He wasn’t presidential. He was a reality television star, but he was also a billionaire, a master dealmaker who always got his way, humiliating anyone who got in his way. He won. He always won – and now America would always win. No nation would ever humiliate America ever again, even if none really had. He said they had, and starting with Mexico, we’d humiliate them all – and starting with Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted, and moving on to Crooked Hillary, he humiliated anyone who disagreed with him about anything at all. His tweets destroyed them. He was a winner. We’d all be winners, again, finally. He’d make America great again – and America made him president.
America was wrong about him. He’s not that master dealmaker who always gets his way. He doesn’t humiliate anyone who gets in his way. He’s a loser. He’s the one who got humiliated:
President Trump on Friday agreed to temporarily reopen the federal government without getting any new money for his U.S.-Mexico border wall, retreating from the central promise of his presidency, for now, in the face of intense public anger.
The president’s humbling concession to the new realities of divided government brought the nation’s longest government shutdown to an end on its 35th day. It was a major victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who took charge of a new House Democratic majority just three weeks ago and kept her large caucus unified throughout the standoff.
“Our diversity is our strength,” Pelosi told reporters after the agreement was reached. “But our unity is our power. And that is what maybe the president underestimated.”
Trump announced the deal in an early afternoon speech in the Rose Garden. By evening the Senate, and then the House, had passed the plan by voice vote, and both chambers adjourned.
That’s the gist of it in four paragraphs from the Washington Post. Both chambers adjourned and Trump signed his humiliation:
Trump signed the plan into law later Friday night, bringing an end to weeks of anxiety for 800,000 federal workers who will soon receive back pay after missing two consecutive paychecks. The shutdown had also threatened important government functions, impeding Food and Drug Administration safety inspections and the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to process tax refunds, and – in a final sign that it could continue no longer – causing delays Friday at major East Coast airports as unpaid air traffic controllers failed to report to work.
The deal reopens the government through Feb. 15, while also creating a bipartisan, bicameral committee charged with negotiating an agreement on border security as part of a new spending bill for the Homeland Security Department.
The cost was high and this puts everything back to where it was before the shutdown. In late December everyone had agreed to keep things humming along for a few weeks while both sides together worked out what to do about the wall and the border. Trump said that was fine, and then he changed his mind. He’d sign nothing but a bill that had billions for his wall. He blindsided his own party. The government would shut down until he got his way. His own party humored him, and worried, and the Democrats said he’d not get those billions, or maybe he would, but they wouldn’t talk to him about any of that until the government reopened.
He said no. They’d give in and give him his money or the government would shut down and fall apart, and that’d be their fault – that was masterful negotiation. And then he caved, and said he did no such thing:
Trump sought to cast the creation of the congressional committee as a win, and even in his moment of defeat did not let up on his demands for a southern border wall that he had repeatedly said Mexico would finance. Renewing his threats, the president insisted Congress must give him wall funding or risk another government shutdown in three weeks – or a declaration of a national emergency that would allow him to circumvent Congress and use the military to build the wall.
He said we really have no choice but to build a powerful wall – and the Democrats would cave or he’d shut down the government again. Or he’d bypass Congress entirely and strip the military of funds they use to build barracks and repair runways and that sort of thing, and use that money to build a big wall. And no one believed a word of it. No one wants another shutdown. Republicans would help override any move he made to shut things down again – and any attempt to render Congress irrelevant will be shot down in the courts, immediately. It was all bullshit, because nothing had changed:
Democrats expressed willingness to negotiate with the president on border security issues they agree on – such as the need for improved technology – but said, as they have from the start, that there will be no money for Trump’s wall. He had been insisting on an initial payment of $5.7 billion.
“Have I not been clear on the wall? No, I have been very clear on the wall,” Pelosi told reporters at a joint news conference with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) after the deal was announced.
And there was this:
Pelosi and Schumer took a measured tone in their comments, avoiding gloating and deflecting opportunities to declare victory over the president, even as they welcomed a deal laid out on their own terms.
“I don’t see this as any power play,” Pelosi said.
Trump probably sees that statement as a power play in and of itself. She seemed to telling him to grow up. This won’t end well, and there’s this:
The mood among Senate Republicans was sour in the wake of Trump’s announced deal, as they found themselves back where they were right before Christmas, when they voted for a short-term spending bill with no wall funding only to see Trump turn against it the next morning amid a ferocious conservative backlash. In the subsequent weeks, Republicans largely supported the president through the shutdown, incurring the wrath of some constituents and achieving nothing in the end.
“This never should have happened,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on the Senate floor. “We cannot mess with people’s lives this way.”
And there was this:
Trump’s retreat caused a swift backlash from some on the right, with commentator Ann Coulter writing over Twitter: “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”
And there was this:
The shutdown also exposed fraught new divisions and weaknesses within Trump’s administration, with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross earning scorn for questioning earlier this week why some furloughed workers were going to food pantries, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray decrying the shutdown’s effect on his employees in an unusual video message directed to FBI staff.
“Making some people stay home when they don’t want to, and making others show up without pay, it’s mind-boggling, it’s shortsighted and it’s unfair,” Wray said. “It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time.”
Trump was being humiliated, and Philip Rucker, with Josh Dawsey and Seung Min Kim, has the inside story of how this mess happened:
His poll numbers were plummeting. His FBI director was decrying the dysfunction. The nation’s air travel was in chaos. Federal workers were lining up at food banks. Economic growth was at risk of flatlining, and even some Republican senators were in open revolt.
So on Friday, the 35th day of a government shutdown that he said he was proud to instigate, President Trump finally folded. After vowing for weeks that he would keep the government closed unless he secured billions in funding for his promised border wall, Trump agreed to reopen it.
And he got nothing at all for his effort, and everyone sees who he is now:
“He was the prisoner of his own impulse and it turned into a catastrophe for him,” said David Axelrod, who was a White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “The House of Representatives has power and authority – and now a speaker who knows how to use it – so that has to become part of his calculation or he’ll get embarrassed again.”
He’ll get embarrassed again:
When Trump stood alone in a bitter-cold White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon to announce that the government was reopening with no money for the wall, he punctuated five weeks of miscalculation and mismanagement by him and his administration…
For weeks, Trump has sought an exit ramp from the shutdown that would still secure wall funding, and for weeks his advisers failed to identify a viable one.
Trump repeatedly predicted to advisers that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would cave and surmised that she had a problem with the more liberal members of her caucus. But she held firm, and her members stayed united.
“Why are they always so loyal?” Trump asked in one staff meeting, complaining that Democrats so often stick together while Republicans sometimes break apart, according to attendees.
That was whining, but the problem was structural:
As for their negotiations, Trump and Pelosi had not spoken since their Jan. 9 session in which the president stormed out of the White House Situation Room. In a private meeting with some columnists earlier this week, Pelosi was asked why she thought Trump had not created a more potent nickname for her than “Nancy.” She replied, according to a senior Democratic aide, “Some people think that’s because he understands the power of the speaker.”
He finally understood the structure of the government, but there were things he still didn’t understand:
Trump and his advisers misunderstood the will of Democrats to oppose wall funding. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, emerged as the most powerful White House adviser during the shutdown and told colleagues that Trump’s plan for $5.7 billion in wall funding would get Democratic votes in the Senate on Thursday, astonishing Capitol Hill leaders and other White House aides.
Kushner, who Trump jokingly says is to the “left,” pitched a broader immigration deal and had faith that he could negotiate a grand bargain in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with his discussions.
That went nowhere – the Golden Boy was useless – but his father-in-law couldn’t accept that:
At a meeting Wednesday with conservative groups, the president accused former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) of having “screwed him” by not securing border wall money when Republicans had the majority, according to one attendee, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He said Ryan should have gotten him money before he left but he had no juice and had “gone fishing,” according to two attendees.
Ryan had warned the president against a shutdown and told him it would be politically disastrous, according to a person familiar with their conversations.
Trump will never forgive Ryan for being right about that, but Ryan didn’t matter now:
White House aides had been monitoring Transportation Security Administration data on airport security delays and staffing levels several times a day. Officials said Thursday that the situation was worsening and would probably force the end of the shutdown.
But events at the Capitol on Thursday are largely what triggered Trump to conclude that he had run out of time and that he had to reopen the government, his aides said.
Trump lost control of his party as fissures emerged among exasperated Republican senators. Six of them voted Thursday for a Democratic spending bill, and others privately voiced frustration with Vice President Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during a closed-door, contentious luncheon.
That may be what ended this:
McConnell called Trump on Thursday to say that the shutdown could not hold because some of his members were in revolt. The president did not commit to ending it in that call, but he phoned McConnell back that evening to say he had concluded the shutdown had to end, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.
Under attack from some Republican colleagues, McConnell told senators on Friday that Trump had come up with the idea for a three-week deal – and that the president would be announcing it.
When Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) visited the White House on Thursday, he said Trump was in a “pragmatic” mood, mentioning the failed Senate votes and saying he wanted to make a deal.
Trump simply gave up, except for this:
A senior White House official said the administration’s negotiating team has received “dozens of signals from Democrats that they are willing to give the president wall money,” but declined to name any such lawmakers.
The administration may have been referring to a letter written by freshman Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and signed by more than 30 House Democrats, which merely called for a vote on Trump’s border security proposal once the government reopens.
But “that vote would obviously fail in the House,” one senior Democratic aide pointed out. “This is just pathetic spin.”
In fact, he had lost:
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said, “The poll numbers tell a very stark story, but it’s only part of the more enduring longer-term effect on the president’s credibility. He essentially held America hostage for a vanity project and a campaign applause line that the American people saw clearly was never worth shutting down the government to achieve.”
America had taken a chance on the wrong guy, and Alex Wagner adds this:
Trump has intersected with powerful women before – Hillary Clinton, most notably – and showed little hesitation to diminish and demean. But Pelosi, who once joked to me she eats nails for breakfast, is a ready warrior. She is happy to meet the demands of war, whereas Clinton was reluctant, semi-disgusted, and annoyed to be dragged to the depths that running against Trump demanded. The speaker of the House is, technically, coastal elite from San Francisco, but she was trained in the hurly-burly of machine politics of Baltimore by her father, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. It is not a coincidence that Pelosi has managed, over and over, to vanquish her rivals in the challenges for Democratic leadership: she flocks to the fight, not just because she usually wins, but apparently because she likes it.
And she’s a winner:
To be powerful and to also need nothing is to be in the catbird seat, and Pelosi, in this moment, had both: her House majority is on offense, and the shutdown was – and now forevermore will be – Trump’s humiliation. If we can give credit to the president in this moment of failure, perhaps it is in the fact that he likely recognized, before even the first federal worker was furloughed, that Pelosi had already won.
Ezra Klein sees that too, and after his review of how a good number of Democrats really didn’t want her to be speaker this time, he sees why she is just right for the job:
It’s not that House Democrats dismissed Pelosi’s skills as a legislator, but what they needed was an answer to President Trump, and that didn’t seem like a role Pelosi was suited to play.
But in recent weeks, Speaker Pelosi proved a powerful foil to Trump, politically humiliating him in a way no other public figure has.
She was, after all, the one who got Trump right:
Pelosi correctly read Trump’s personality and had the steel to act on that read. For years now, members of Congress have divided on whether Trump is strong or weak, whether his political success shows an intuitive tactical genius that needs to be respected or a hollow showman who connects to conservatives but is easily flummoxed.
Pelosi has long held that Trump is weak, easily confused, and easily baited. That informed her strategy. Along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, she baited Trump into saying, while the cameras were rolling, “I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.” In interviews and meetings, she tweaked the president, calling the crisis “the Trump shutdown” to Trump’s face and suggesting the billionaire thought furloughed workers “could just ask their father for more money.” She was betting that Trump would overreact rather than turn her into the aggressor, and he did.
Pelosi also drew a hard line on the wall, and then made an even higher-risk gamble in postponing the State of the Union, betting all the while that Trump would blink. Again, she was right.
As Putin in Russia and Kim in North Korea both know, Trump can be manipulated, and Pelosi knows that too, because Trump is a rube and an easy mark:
Pelosi had the crucial assistance of Trump himself. He forced a shutdown his own party tried to avoid, he publicly took ownership of that shutdown, and he held to a position that was unpopular at the start and grew more toxic by the day. The core structure of this conflict was always that the public didn’t want a government shutdown, Democrats didn’t want a government shutdown, and Trump was forcing a government shutdown. Pelosi would’ve had to make some terrible tactical errors to lose from a position that strong, and she didn’t.
Now, just days after agreeing to postpone the State of the Union at Pelosi’s insistence, Trump has agreed to reopen the government without any funding for his wall. Pelosi has proved what many didn’t believe about Trump: that he is subject to the normal laws of political gravity, and that for all his bluster, he is no more capable of sustaining an unsustainable position than any other politician.
Klein says that changes things:
Pelosi is now the clear leader of the Democratic opposition, and she has shown herself more than Trump’s equal in a legislative showdown. She has enhanced her standing in her caucus, and he has diminished his standing inside his own. You don’t hear many House Democrats these days grumbling about Pelosi’s leadership. But you hear plenty of Republicans lamenting Trump’s.
And something else changed too. Karen Tumulty notes this:
The stereotype of government employees as pampered, overpaid, Washington-bound bureaucrats has been around for many years. Republicans have long portrayed them as the enemies of reform and efficiency.
But Trump targeted them as no one did before. From his earliest months in office, he and his allies have portrayed those who dedicate their lives to serving their country as the corrupt, subversive “deep state” – the bottom-feeders of a swamp in need of draining.
As the shutdown began, Trump first made the absurd suggestion that 800,000 government workers were happy to give up grocery and rent money for a construction project on the U.S.-Mexico border that would stand as a monument to the president’s vanity. Then he contradicted himself in a tweet that declared it was largely his political enemies who were feeling the pain: “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”
Where a little empathy might have been in order as the shutdown continued, Trump’s team revealed a callousness that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.
It was more than a month of more of the same – these people really don’t matter – but everyone came to know them, or already knew them, and then everyone suddenly saw that they did useful work for everyone in the country. Trump had to wince and reluctantly admit that:
It was noticeable that when Trump made his Rose Garden announcement Friday that the government was opening again, he began it by thanking federal workers who had displayed “extraordinary devotion in the face of this recent hardship. You are fantastic people. You are incredible patriots.”
On that point, Trump was absolutely right. Government employees have shown they are all that and more. That is why they deserve much better than a chief executive who would wager so recklessly with their lives and their livelihoods.
Trump couldn’t have it both ways. Either these were fine people or they were, as originally presented, useless parasites ruining the country. Trump had settled on saying that there were fine people, who he had gleefully used and abused for thirty-four days. What? Donald Trump was having a bad day.
It was a very bad day:
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III unveiled criminal charges Friday against Roger Stone, a longtime friend of President Trump’s, accusing him of lying, obstruction and witness tampering in one of the longest legal sagas of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In charging Stone, Mueller has struck deep inside Trump’s inner circle. The indictment charges that Stone, a seasoned Republican political operative, sought to gather information about hacked Democratic Party emails at the direction of an unidentified senior Trump campaign official and engaged in extensive efforts to keep secret the details of those actions.
But that’s another matter entirely. America took a chance with Donald Trump. Oops. Now what?
Just Above Sunset 