Honestly, Trump should just say “send me a bill and I’ll sign it”. Then he holds his nose and signs it.
My current expectation is that Mueller will start arresting people on the Saudi/Israeli side of collusion and release his Russian report, and those will both kill Trump politically. During that period, whether it takes out Trump or not, the Senate will vote to fund the government, minus anything to do with immigration or walls.
On the whole, I think that the shutdown is good for Trump in that it helps to slow down the various forces that are out for him. But as it starts to interfere with business, the pressure brought on him and the Democrats to give in will become pretty fierce. In general, I would expect the side that was lower in popularity to cave first but, as said, the shutdown is good for Trump so I think that the Republican Senators will circumvent the President, particularly if his legal problems start hopping out of the woodwork again.
Who will hold him to his end of the bargain once he gets his wall money?
Yes. Pretty reasonably so IMO. Trump’s base has a big overlap with the Tea Party movement. There are other chunks. There are the disaffected voters that got involved because of Trump. There are the Obama to Trump voters that here in the midwest seem to skew towards blue collar union members. There are the overt racists.* That Tea Party chunk of the GOP alone was dangerous and relatively big before Trump. They also have high turnout including in primaries.
They did produce some big wins over incumbents early in the Tea Party movement. Especially in primary races with 3+ candidates losing them as a group probably meant losing. After that early round of Tea Party success more standard GOP politicians pulled hard towards the Tea Party positions. The movement right was a Bill Clinton-esque triangulation within the party. That stopped most of the primary losses but did it by giving that large minority what they wanted.
It’s worse now. There’s a President who is perfectly willing to publicly attack legislators from his own party. he’s done it multiple times. There’s less ability to fly under the radar and get missed by Tea Party ire when the President is insulting you on twitter.
- The dark streak in my humor likes to think about the odd picture of an Illinois nazi standing next to an Obama 2012 voter at a Trump rally. Talk about strange bedfellows.
They all saw what happened to Jeff Flake.
Realistically, I don’t see any way out if the situation stands as it is. The Democrats are not getting blamed for it, and Trump doesn’t care if he does get blamed, because he doesn’t believe it’s real.
What it’s going to take is work not getting done. For instance, there’s only so far you can push IRS employees to work without pay before they throw up their hands and get another job. It’s not like we get paid that much in the first place. Eventually, the government is going to be facing a very serious personnel crisis; in inability to function simply due to not having enough warm bodies to do the work. As those functions stop, ahem, functioning that will force those running for re-election to act. FTR, I don’t believe Trump is one of them. I don’t think he has any intention to run again, despite his assurances that he does. So he isn’t budging.
Frankly, I feel that ultimately it will come down to Republican congresspeople to cooperate with the Democrats, far enough to put something through with enough of a margin to overrule a veto. I doubt it will be a finished-product budget, but something temporary to get things going again. Then it will be a matter of seeing how Trump responds to that to decide how to proceed.
It’s actually quite a bit worse than that. Trump’s “compromise” bill contained a number of other provisions that are… shall we say… Completely bugfuck insane?!
Cliffs notes version:
- The protection for DREAMers only applies to those currently within the DACA program and cannot be renewed. It would only grant those protections to those Trump is currently trying to fuck over.
- The bill would demand that any migrant children from central America apply for asylum at (as-of-yet nonexistent) application centers in central America - they can no longer apply in America.
- Also, it caps applications at 15,000 per year. This would not be subject to judicial review, apparently.
- The bill still demands 5.7 Billion for the wall
- The bill is still fundamentally still hostage-taking - if this was a compromise, it could be passed without holding the government hostage in the process.
It’s bad. This is not good-faith negotiation. It’s not even trying to be. It’s PR spin. A bill that there’s no way in hell the democrats will sign (for most of the same reason they won’t just give Trump 5.7 Billion for the wall), so that McConnell and Trump can pretend that the democrats are the ones holding the government closed, and that they’re willing to compromise. I’d like to think we’re collectively not going to fall for that, because this bill is garbage, but given the way the media framed it, I’m not particularly hopeful about that.
Paul Krugman has some rather dire predictions on that: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1087770780010799112
Trump’s “compromise” was an act of spectacularly bad faith. We’re shocked, said absolutely nobody. But this then raises once again the question of how the shutdown ends 1/
What seems clear is that things have to get much worse before there’s a resolution – there have to be major economic losses, major disruption of life; maybe massive travel delays, maybe episodes of food poisoning, whatever 2/
At that point one of three things happen (1) Democrats cave and fund the wall (2) Trump caves (3) Republicans in the Senate cut Trump loose and allow a veto-overriding vote. Of these (1) seems unlikely – Pelosi is made of stern stuff, & the Democratic base would go wild 3/
Maybe Trump sees his approval rating plunging and accepts reality. But he hates looking like a loser, plus he’s afraid of Anne Coulter, plus he lives in a bubble in which people tell him the public is on his side 4/
But in that case the shutdown doesn’t end until Trump’s support is so shrunken that Mitch McConnell sees him as a dead man golfing, and is ready to throw him over the side. And things would have to get very bad indeed to reach that point 5/
Am I missing something? I hope so. But right now I can’t see an end to this that doesn’t first involve the economy and the general state of American life going to hell. 6/
I don’t see how else this ends. It’s… not pretty. 
Senate compromise in the works. If I’m reading it right, there will be two votes - one for Trump’s wall money, and one for opening the government for a few weeks. If so, then it seems highly likely to me that Mitch is getting a lot of pressure from his caucus, and this is as close as they can come to saving face. I would expect the wall money vote to fail, and the opening the government temporarily to pass, and then pass the House. And then either a veto or Trump backs down.
If course, that just postpones it for a few weeks, with no guarantees.
If the Dems agree to give Trump $2.8B, what’s stopping him from pulling the same crap and reneging again? Then the starting point would be 2.8 vs. 5.7 so of course they should meet in the middle around $4.5B. Or Trump will instead decide that he actually wants $22.8B so they should meet in the middle of 2.8 and 22.8 and finally agree to $12.8B. Hopefully then Trump would sign it instead of asking for $50B which would force the Dems go go up to $25B.
I mean the reasonable thing is for both sides to compromise, right?
As someone with a lot of travel planned over the next few months, all I can say is that I’m very, very worried.
My niece works in a federal prison; the staff aren’t being paid and the inmates know it. The Bureau of Prisons is running into staffing problems just like the TSA. It’s only matter of time before something horrible happens somewhere. This scares more than anything else.
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Heck, his base won’t see it as a dishonorable breaking of his word, they’ll see it as him having fooled the Democrats. He has an active incentive to renege.
The real wild card may be Mueller. I could see this breaking a month from now with the arrest of one of Trump’s kids.
I’m actually sort of amazed this hasn’t happened yet.
We need the air traffic controllers to walk out next week and threaten the Super Bowl. Or, eventually the overworked, underpaid, and understaffed ATC will lead to a mistake which results in a midair collision, killing enough straight white Christian Americans for Republicans to give a flying fuck.
The people aren’t pressuring their representatives to make a deal it seems. Does this mean they don’t care?
The only potential catastrophes the hysterics are bringing up are related to air travel services. If a non-federal govt solution appears on this front, I don’t see the less hysterical catastrophes from pushing people to pressure their representatives to make a deal.
IDK what Trump will do over time, and he probably doesn’t either.
Re: republican deal being a sham…
Never. Trust. Trump. You’d have to be impossibly dumb to do so.
And you know this…how?:dubious:
The way I see it, there are four possible general outcomes. Here they are in order of decreasing likelihood.
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Mitch McConnell gives in and negotiates a deal with Pelosi. Presumably this would involve a Trump veto and an override of the veto.
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Pelosi and congressional Democrats give in “for the good of the country.”
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The shutdown goes on until either Trump is no longer in office or the Democrats lose the House.
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Trump decides to negotiate in good faith.
You’re missing 3.5, in which benevolent aliens show up and give us sufficiently advanced technology to render modern nation-states irrelevant.
I knew I forgot one :smack:.