When Republicans forced a government shutdown in 2013, the Obama administration fenced off the Lincoln Memorial and other monuments on the National Mall, while the president himself wrote a letter to furloughed federal workers.
“None of this is fair to you,” he said, amplifying the visibility of the shutdown even as he stoked sympathy for the people most directly affected.
Now that President Trump has a shutdown instigated by Democrats on his hands, his approach could be summed up this way: Be careful what you wish for.
“The last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” he said in the Oval Office on Tuesday, as the government funding clock ticked down. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want. And they’d be Democrat things.”
Democrats, who are in the minority in both houses of Congress, have gambled that a shutdown is their best and biggest way to show off a willingness to fight Trump, as they try to kick off a broad national conversation about health care costs that can possibly carry through the midterms. “It’s as good a shot as we’re going to get,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, told Michael Barbaro on Tuesday.
But unlike shutdowns past, the president is the wild card. Worry about his intentions is what caused Schumer to pass up his last opportunity to shutter the government. Trump has the bully pulpit, along with a general disregard for the workaday operations of the federal government and a stated willingness to leverage the shutdown itself to punish his political opponents.
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The post The Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For Shutdown appeared first on New York Times.
