When you saw the news alert Tuesday that Donald Trump tweeted the country really “needs a good ‘shutdown’” to cure what ails it, you may have thought (like I did) that the Dons was threatening to veto the bipartisan spending bill that was just agreed on. But that would also assume that Trump knows he can veto a bill. If recent history proves predictive, the Dons may have missed that lesson in U.S. Government, along with other core courses he skipped on International Relations and the Civil War, among many many others (we’re still counting!).
That's where veteran D.C. reporter Carl Hulse comes in.
In fairness to Trump, he did specify in the tweet that a “good shutdown” wasn’t needed until “September” to fix this “mess,” foreshadowing how much fun the 2018 budget negotiations are going to be. But hey, if a shutdown is what’s needed, then why wait, Dons? We know this may sound bizarre given how much red tape there is in Washington and how frustrating the slow grind of bureaucracy is, but this is one area of domestic policy making where you, and you alone, have unilateral control—more power at your fingertips than even the Twitter threat you deployed this morning!
Or perhaps your tweet—and the subsequent coverage of it—is just FAKE NEWS! Because as we know, when you say you’re going to do something and the media reports you’re going to do it and then you don’t, that’s FAKE NEWS in your book. And there’s been a whole lot of FAKE NEWS to go around.