The longest government shutdown in our history, an unmitigated disaster for Republicans and for the tens of thousands of government employees shut out of work for 35 days, was a Freedom Caucus plot, hatched by Rep. Mark Meadows and implemented by Mick Mulvaney, its former member who is now deeply entrenched in the White House.
Really. Our president is so dumb, the Freedom Caucus can effectively manipulate him. All it had to do was have Mulvaney whisper in his ear, and get Fox News and other blowhards to start calling Trump "weak." Meadows believed that a shutdown over the border wall was necessary to "figure out who's going to be the most powerful person in Washington, D.C., and bottom line is, it’s either going to be Nancy Pelosi or it's going to be Donald J. Trump. And that's what this comes down to." So he put his plan in action, convincing Trump not to sign the spending bill, without border funding, that would avert the shutdown. Once he had Trump, he could get the then-majority Republican House to go along. It was all about making Trump think other Republicans thought he was weak. That's what Trump told then-Speaker Paul Ryan when he was preparing to derail the funding bill, that "he was getting beat up on cable television, didn't like it and was turning against the spending plan." The only part of this whole fiasco that's entertaining is the pain it caused Ryan.
Look, he told Trump, "this is some Fox News people, this is some Freedom Caucus guys and that's it." Ryan wanted Trump to see that the opposition was limited. "What's your endgame?" Ryan quizzed him once again. "How do you get out of this? It’s like you're shooting yourself in the foot."
And the result? The Freedom Caucus got its way, got its shutdown; Trump didn't have away out and was forced to reopen government, getting nothing in return. As it goes with pretty much every other power play from the maniacs. The lesson Trump seems to have taken from it isn't that he shouldn't let Mulvaney and Meadows lead him around by the nose, however. It's that "Republicans do not stick together as well" as Democrats. The White House is all Mulvaney's and Meadows' now.