Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill funding government Friday morning and, at the same time, to declare the national emergency he’s using to call this whole debacle a win. His allies concede there’s no winning here: “Zero chance you could spin this as a win for Republicans,” according to House Freedom Caucus extremist Rep. Mark Meadows. “Bluntly, it was a waste of three weeks” from Trump’s cave in reopening government to the “total capitulation” of the bipartisan deal to keep government open.
Trump suddenly turned against the deal on Thursday: “We thought he was good to go all morning, and then suddenly it’s like everything is off the rails,” a Republican aide told the Washington Post. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spent Thursday cajoling Trump, reportedly talking to him on the phone at least three times to keep him from shutting down the government again just three weeks after a record-breaking shutdown. In the end, to get Trump to sign the deal, McConnell agreed to support the national emergency declaration, something a former Republican member of Congress described as “You’re watching Mitch McConnell eat a manure sandwich in this whole process” as he agrees to publicly support something he thinks is a bad idea in order to prevent something that’s a worse idea.
McConnell was just one of several congressional Republicans focused mainly on convincing Trump to sign a bill everyone realized was a bad deal, with Trump and Republicans having lost ground because of the massively unpopular shutdown. But while declaring a national emergency will allow Trump to both claim victory and do some of the damage he so badly wants to do, the story of the last couple months is the story of Trump losing ground.
As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Post, “I think the president’s view was that he could get us to fold,” but “Once he learned he couldn’t bully us into doing what he wanted, once he learned that the public was on our side, he realized he should give up.”
