WELCOME TO AMERICA IN TRUMPLAND. AFTER ONE YEAR, CHAOS CONTINUES TO RULE.
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The elements that produced this weekend’s government shutdown sum up the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency: a dealmaking chief executive who can’t make a deal; a divided Republican Party struggling to govern and in an uneasy relationship with the president; and a Democratic Party tethered to its anti-Trump progressive base in the face of political risk.
It was fitting that the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration would be a day of chaos, uncertainty, recrimination and efforts at political point-scoring. That has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency. Why should the anniversary of his swearing-in be significantly different from most of the previous 365 days?
[The early weeks of 2018 have felt eerily similar to those of 2017, as upheaval has consumed the president’s agenda and message — including the shutdown battle, a tell-all book chronicling a president at sea and news of a payout before the 2016 election to a porn star alleging an affair with Trump.]
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The story the past two weeks is of a president who either doesn’t know his own mind, isn’t in charge of his own White House or simply cannot be trusted with his word. He ping-ponged from promising to take heat if legislators brought him an immigration deal, to balking when Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) delivered the outlines of one, to unexpectedly summoning Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to the White House on Friday for talks, to deciding or being persuaded by those around him not to go ahead with whatever he and Schumer were discussing.
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The president bears significant responsibility for the mixed signals he delivered and for not making clear his bottom line. It was telling that neither the Democrats nor Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill knew what he was willing to accept.
[“I’m looking for something that President Trump supports,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in public frustration at one point late in the negotiations. “And he’s not yet indicated what measure he’s willing to sign.”]
[“Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O,” Schumer complained on the Senate floor Saturday, some 12 hours into the shutdown. “It’s next to impossible.”]
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[The final 24 hours before the shutdown played out in a dizzying series of private huddles, frenzied phone calls and belligerent public pronouncements from both sides. Through it all, the president remained mercurial and unreadable even to those ostensibly negotiating with him.
Many Republicans relished the spot Schumer was in — torn between liberals positioning for a 2020 presidential race and centrists facing reelection in 2018 in conservative states — and wanted to keep him under pressure.
Over cheeseburgers in the private dining room just off the Oval Office, Trump and Schumer discussed a comprehensive deal that would include an immigration component and keep the government open, along with disaster relief and budget caps. Schumer signaled he would be open to border wall funding in exchange for action to protect those covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) but he wanted the president to agree to a five-day measure to keep the government open to give both sides time to negotiate something longer term.
But as the day wore on, McConnell urged Chief of Staff John Kelly to not give in. Worried White House aides began making calls to their counterparts on the Hill, assuring them that Trump wouldn’t “give away the store,” .... [In the end,] Kelly called Schumer, telling the Democrat that his immigration proposal was too liberal and would not work for the administration. ]
The Republicans own the government in Washington, controlling the White House, the House and the Senate. Yet over the past year, they have found themselves repeatedly stymied by their own internal divisions, their lack of clarity on matters such as health care, and their tense relationship with a president whom few of them favored during the 2016 GOP primaries and whose behavior rankles even those who have remained relatively silent.
The Republicans have made a bargain: accept the president’s bad behavior as a price for moving a conservative agenda. They’ve pushed through judges at a fast pace. They managed to pass a tax bill in record speed at the end of last year, an accomplishment they hope will pay dividends in an election year they head into with a certain amount of dread. But this has been anything but an enjoyable year for those who dreamed for years of having the kind of power the party now has.
Since the fall — as Republicans pushed to lower the corporate tax rate and provide income tax cuts that will greatly benefit the wealthy — two vulnerable populations awaited help.
One group is the dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, who were given protected status by Obama but suddenly saw that protection taken away by Trump.
The other is the beneficiaries of one of the most popular and successful safety net programs of the modern era, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, better known as CHIP.
Both these groups of young people became central players in what turned into monthly battles over funding the government for the duration of this fiscal year. That, despite the fact that an overwhelming percentage of Americans — including elected officials from both parties, as well as the president — favor extending CHIP and restoring the dreamers’ protection from deportation.
Republicans attached a six-year extension of CHIP to the latest short-term spending bill, hoping the move would force Democrats to swallow the bill without a deal on the dreamers. That calculation, cynical in the eyes of Democrats — who have been calling for action on CHIP for months — failed and created the conditions that helped bring about the shutdown.
Democrats, meanwhile, showed how a year of grass-roots resistance to Trump has affected their party. The party not only leans further to the left; it is also more militant in opposition to the president, making any negotiation complicated. The power of this resistance blossomed the day after Trump’s inauguration with the Women’s March, nationwide outpourings that were larger and stronger than anyone anticipated. Women continue to lead the resistance to Trump, and Saturday’s anniversary marches across the country highlighted that anew.
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New York City: Tens of thousands of protesters gathered near Central Park for the Manhattan march. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5292295/Womens-March-anniversary-Trumps-inauguration.html#ixzz54o9ANSz9 Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook |
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, daily demonstrations by dreamers and their allies have heightened the pressure on Schumer and other Democratic leaders not to let another opportunity pass to fix their status.