Twenty days into a partial government shutdown, the impact on government workers, their families, and basic services is coming into view. Food is not being inspected. Transportation Security Administration workers are calling in sick rather than working without pay. Millions could be evicted from their home, hundreds of thousands of workers are about to miss their paycheck, and tens of millions could lose food assistance. All because the president isn’t getting his way. [...]
What makes this shutdown distinctly Trumpian is not only that the president has taken credit for it, but that it was provoked by his most reliable trigger, being humiliated by a woman. Democrats and Republicans had already negotiated a deal to fund the government and border security without the wall. But after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump that he lacked the votes to pass a bill with money for a wall and Ann Coulter mocked him, Trump erupted and demanded that the lame-duck Republican House pass funding for a wall, scuttling the deal. When Trump met with Democrats on Wednesday and they repeated that they will not fund his wall, the president said “Bye-bye” and walked out. Making maximalist demands, offering nothing in return, and then withdrawing in anger the second those demands are not met is a child’s strategy for getting what he wants.
Others have already pointed out that the empirical case for the wall is thin. Despite what the administration has argued, most drugs come to the United States through ports of entry; terrorists fly to the U.S. rather than engaging in dangerous, grueling overland treks over thousands of miles to enter from the southern border; and the wall won’t halt the smuggling or illegal entries it is designed to stop. It would, however, be a massive, official symbol of American hostility toward immigrants of Latin American descent, which is why it matters so much to both Trump and his fiercest supporters.
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