Shutdown? More Like a Breakdown

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/government-shutdown-2018-trump.html

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Watching President Trump hold the nation hostage over funding for his border wall has been enough to give a person vertigo.

The spectacle began gearing up early last week, when, in an Oval Office tête-à-tête with the Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the president boasted that he would be “proud” to bring parts of the government to a halt if Congress did not hand over $5 billion for his border wall. He stuck with this position for basically a week, until, come Tuesday, he executed a tidy flip-flop, sending word via his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that he would, in fact, accept a stopgap bill that did not include money for a border wall. Lawmakers promptly slapped together such a plan, zipped it over to the White House and hit the road for Christmas break.

Then Twitter came for him. Ann Coulter called him “gutless.” Conservative pundits accused him of caving on his signature campaign promise and denounced him as a squish. Members of the Freedom Caucus took to the floor of the House to plead with him not to betray the cause. Mr. Trump’s wall-worshiping base began abandoning him.

Unable to bear the scorn of Ms. Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and his cheerleaders at “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump promptly reversed course. On Thursday, he rejected Congress’s temporary funding deal, declaring that either he’d get his $5 billion for a wall (or as he now calls it, “steel slats”) or Americans would get a “Democrat shutdown.” It’s called branding. Never mind that it bears no relation to reality.

By Friday, he was in full attack mode. During morning Executive Time, he let loose with a classic Twitter barrage, slamming Democrats and urging the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to go “nuclear” if necessary — that is, blow up the legislative filibuster to push through an agreement with a simple majority of votes. Disinclined to abandon his institutional prerogatives for even the most magnificent wall, Mr. McConnell immediately made clear this was not an option.

At an afternoon bill signing, the president continued trying to shift blame onto Democrats, calling the wall “an issue of crime” and “safety,” claiming that it would “pay for itself on a monthly basis” and asserting that even President Ronald Reagan had failed in his quest for a border wall (which, in fact, Mr. Reagan never sought).

Senators trickled back into town to vote on a procedural motion on whether to move forward with the House’s latest proposal, which includes Mr. Trump’s wall money. But Senate leaders made clear that nothing was likely to move until a new bipartisan compromise could be reached. Midafternoon, Ms. Sanders told Roll Call that there might be some lower level of wall funding that would satisfy the president. The talks to resolve the dispute collapsed Friday night. And the shutdown became a certainty.

This is what happens when the nation’s chief executive holds a leadership philosophy akin to that of the Petyr Baelish character on “Game of Thrones” — namely, that “chaos is a ladder.” For most people, uncertainty and disorder are scary, unsettling forces to be avoided. But for Mr. Trump, they are cherished friends and strategic assets, in part specifically because other people are so anxious to avoid them. The president clearly believes that throwing everyone else off balance gives him an edge — that is, if he can make the turmoil fierce enough, those around him will give up and give in.

Better still, even when he doesn’t get his way, piling on the pandemonium keeps people from focusing on any one piece of it. The normal human mind can cope with only so much drama before it gets overloaded. Mr. Trump grasps better than most that a single scandal is cause for public outrage, while a million scandals is a statistic.

There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump was upset about conservatives trashing him for flirting with a wall-free spending bill. This president is driven by an insatiable need for adulation. The less popular he becomes with the bulk of the nation, the more vital it is for him — emotionally and politically — to keep his base happy.

But it’s also true that revving up the wall fight allows Mr. Trump to divert attention from so much of the other drama threatening to swallow him up.

Even by Trumpian standards, the president has been enduring a bumpy patch. This week alone, Wall Street had its worst stretch in a decade; the Trump Foundation agreed to close up shop following accusations of “a shocking pattern of illegality”; the Supreme Court declined to allow enforcement of Mr. Trump’s planned asylum ban, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg casting her vote shortly before undergoing surgery for lung cancer; and a backlash erupted over Mr. Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.

This move proved too much for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who tendered his resignation on Thursday with a letter widely received as a rebuke to the president’s approach to foreign policy and national security. At this rate, the only person left in the administration by Valentine’s Day will be Mick Mulvaney, the incoming acting White House chief of staff. Then again, word around Washington is that the president has been displeased with Mr. Mulvaney’s failure to come up with shutdown solutions, and in 2015, Mr. Mulvaney called Mr. Trump’s ideas about a border wall “absurd and almost childish.” So who knows how long until that relationship sours?

And, of course, hovering above it all, the president’s legal troubles keep mounting as the Russia investigation churns on.

Faced with all that, who wouldn’t rather throw himself into a fight — maybe even shut down parts of the government — over a border wall? At least with his wall, Mr. Trump gets to pretend that he is still in control, even as his administration sinks further and further into the swamp.

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