As his government shutdown reaches the one-week mark, Donald Trump should be looking for a deal. Instead, he’s looking for a hostage.
The entire process has been shaped by the president’s desperate search for some kind of leverage over his opponents, whom he could try to persuade or negotiate with, but whom he’d prefer to force into giving him what he wants. Trump’s initial posture, for example, was simple: “Give me a wall or I’ll shut down the government.”
When that didn’t work, the Republican told Democrats he would refuse to sign “any of their legislation, including infrastructure,” unless they approved funding for his wall.
That failed, too, leading Trump to settle on a new hostage this morning.
President Donald Trump threatened on Friday to close the nation’s southern border if Congress doesn’t fund his border wall.
“We build the wall or,” Trump wrote in a string of tweets. “…close the southern border.”
In one of the president’s tweets, he went so far as to write that he will be “forced” to close the U.S./Mexico border “entirely.”
How serious is Trump about this? Your guess is as good as mine. In reality, there’s no reason to even consider such a move — there is no crisis at the border, and illegal border crossings are already at their lowest point in several years — and if the president actually pursued such a policy, the economic reverberations would be considerable.
But while we wait to see whether Trump is serious about his own nonsensical plans, it’s worth appreciating what we’re learning about how this president approaches negotiations.
Trump’s confusion about every relevant policy detail notwithstanding, he knows what he wants (a giant, ineffective wall) and he knows whom he needs to convince (congressional Democrats). The “ultimate dealmaker” — a label White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used to describe her boss — would be exploring ways to reach some kind of agreement.
In fact, the political world doesn’t much focus on this anymore, but it wasn’t long ago that Trump touted his deal-making abilities as his greatest and most important quality. “Deals are my art form,” the Republican boasted ahead of his presidential campaign. “Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
It’s partly why he paid a ghost-writer to help write a book called, “The Art of the Deal.”
So where are these vaunted deal-making skills now? Instead of looking for hostages he’s threatening to hurt, shouldn’t the president be applying his expert negotiating skills?
A cynic might wonder if maybe Trump isn’t the “ultimate dealmaker” after all.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."