Trump Decides to Own the Shutdown
In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise. . .
But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways.
Hmm, how could someone like that be elected dogcatcher, much less win two presidential elections? The answer is that the conventional wisdom seriously underestimates the guy. Even MSNBC has a smarter take:
The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu famously wrote, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
Congressional Democrats would be wise to keep this maxim in mind. Under pressure from their loudest supporters to stand up to President Donald Trump, they are laying the groundwork to shut down the government at the end of this month. But while there are reasonable arguments in support of a shutdown, it’s a fight that Democrats would most likely lose, and they should do everything to avoid it.
This piece, from earlier in the week, simply takes the posiition that government shutdowns heretofore have been a Republican strategy, but it's never worked for them, and there's no reason to expect it will work any better for Democrats this time. But now it looks like circumstances have given Trump a new twist.Dayen in the first link above accuses Trump of lying about the Democrat demands, but it simply isn't clear what they wanted. He says below that he reviewed the details, and I see no reason to doubt him: Instead, it looks like Jeffries and Schumer, both from New York and thus acutely aware of the Mamdani phenomenon, whereby tired machine Democrats are losing primaries to fresh parlor leftist faces, are being forced into hard left positions to look like they're standing up to Trump -- except this is exactly what Trunp wants them to do:
The White House has instructed U.S. federal agencies to brace for mass firings as a government shutdown looms next week. This directive originated from a memo by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Unlike previous shutdowns, the Trump administration plans to go beyond temporary furloughs. Agencies have been told to target programs that are not legally mandated to continue, as outlined in the memo sent to media on Wednesday.
The memo emphasized that programs lacking mandatory appropriations will face significant impacts. Agencies must submit their staff reduction plans and notify employees accordingly.
Even the NeverTrump Wall Street Journal sees what's happening:
Democrats will give the Trump team exactly what it’s been wanting—a shutdown—in return for Democrats’ continuing to demand something they will never get. What a deal. Even Faust got some worldly pleasure in exchange for a soul. This is trading hellfire for brimstone.
. . . The true scope of this losing proposition came clear with a memo Mr. Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued Wednesday night, explaining how a shutdown will roll. Shutdowns usually mean furloughed federal employees, who suffer temporary inconvenience before resuming their jobs. Not this time.
The Vought memo orders agencies to identify all programs that depend on discretionary funding (which lapses next week) and don’t align with the president’s priorities. Employees who administer those disfavored programs or projects won’t be furloughed. They will be fired.
According to The Hill,
Cracks are starting to form in the Senate Democratic caucus over whether to hold the line against a seven-week clean government funding stopgap passed by the House, according to Democratic sources who say a threat by President Trump to lay off thousands of federal workers is changing the Democratic political calculus on a shutdown.
. . . Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who plans to retire from the Senate at the end of 2026, has been “putting out feelers” to Republican senators about reaching some sort of deal or mutual understanding to avoid a government shutdown next week, according to a source familiar with her conversations with Senate colleagues.
Shaheen told Semafor in an interview Wednesday that she sees “a number of ways” to avoid a government shutdown “that should satisfy both sides” and opened the door to voting for the House-passed stopgap next week when Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) brings it back to the Senate floor.
I keep thinking back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style that I last referred to in March:
An analysis of Trump’s negotiation behavior reveals how he embodies each of these four roles. His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage (controller) as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options (performer). If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).
It's time for legacy media to scrap the stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, boorish, impulsive, and vindictive.