At around 11 A.M. on Wednesday, a weary-looking Senator Mitch McConnell came to the Senate floor. “It’s time to get this done,” the Majority Leader said. McConnell, of course, was talking about the deal that his negotiators had reached with Democrats to pass a bill that would keep the U.S. government from shutting down once again—over President Trump’s demand for money to fund his proposed border wall. As always, there remained one big problem: whether Trump himself would go along with it. Soon after the deal was announced, John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, flew back with the President to Washington from El Paso, on Air Force One, on Tuesday. He and others urged Trump to accept it and move on, but Cornyn was nowhere near sure that it would happen. “My hope is he recognizes this is an incremental win,” the senator told Politico. “We’ll hold our breath.”
No one these days, not even the loyal Republican guard on Capitol Hill, can predict what Trump, increasingly cornered by the results of a midterm election that handed Democrats control of the House of Representatives, will do or say. There is no Team Trump from the President’s point of view, only a leader and his followers, yet the entire Trump Presidency is an extended reminder of the fact that it’s awfully hard to follow if you don’t know where the leader wants you to go. “I would have preferred we not had the shutdown,” Steve Scalise, the Republican Whip in the House, said Thursday morning, without knowing if there might be another. When CNN caught up with his G.O.P. colleague Richard Shelby, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who cut the deal, Shelby was unsure of what Trump would do, as well. “I pray” that he will sign the spending bill, Shelby said. At around that same time, the Republican Chuck Grassley was on the Senate floor, asking the entire chamber to join in seeking divine intervention with Trump. “Let’s all pray that the President will have the wisdom to sign the bill, so that the government doesn’t shut down,” he said, as Washington waited, once again, on its capricious President.
So it’s finally come to this: only God can stop Trump, as members of his own party are admitting that they’ve basically given up trying. Sure enough, a few hours after Grassley spoke, McConnell returned to the Senate floor and announced that the President would sign the bill but also declare a national emergency in order to fund the wall. The whole episode served only to underscore the plight of congressional Republicans under Trump: holding their breath and praying that Trump doesn’t humiliate them even more than he already has with the shutdown drama; praying that something worse doesn’t happen, such as a Mueller report that forces them to publicly choose between their President and their country; praying that the Democrats will somehow overplay their hand so badly that it changes the subject in next year’s elections from Trump and all his divisiveness. “That soft, shuffling sound you hear is congressional Republicans stepping away from President Trump,” the political commentator John Harwood wrote, in his CNBC column on Tuesday. In the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the lead editorial begged Trump to declare “border victory” and go home. “The bipartisan deal is his only good way out of this budget box canyon,” the paper said. Underscoring the point, the editors ran an op-ed on the page across from the editorial headlined “Trump’s wall crumbles under the law of diminishing returns.” The piece argued that Trump is in such trouble now because he “promised to be a dealmaker, not a conviction politician,” and he just doesn’t have deals to brag about.
Watching Republicans publicly lobby their guy to give in this week was an extraordinary tutorial in their challenge of trying to manage an unmanageable President. They had to convince Trump that a loss was a win, albeit, as Cornyn put it, a highly “incremental” one. Even for Trump, this was a dubious argument. Still, Trump has one political skill that is useful to his allies in a situation like this: the desire, and ability, to create an alternate reality when the actual reality does not suffice. The facts here are terrible for the President, as they have been since late December, when Trump reneged on the previous deal reached by congressional negotiators and, essentially, unilaterally shut down a large part of the federal government. Thirty-five days later, that shutdown ended ignominiously for the President, when too many members of his own party had had enough. The two-week delay that Trump bought himself at the time also has now ended without a victory. Instead, the compromise agreed to on the Hill allows for $1.375 billion in border-security funding—far less than what was on offer in a deal Trump rejected last year. And, in another loss, those funds can only be used to construct fifty-five miles of new border barriers of the type the government has been building since well before Trump became President. In other words: no wall.
For any other politician, this would be a humiliating loss, which is the reason why Republicans on Capitol Hill were so uncertain, right up until the last minute, whether the President would sign it. Trump, however, has already begun the process of memorializing his epic defeat as a victory, and will claim that his emergency declaration is more than sufficient grounds to move money around from elsewhere in the federal budget to accomplish his border plans. Even if the courts shoot him down on that one, it still probably won’t matter to the President, who is likely to brag that he has won, anyway. On Monday, in fact, he held a campaign rally in El Paso underneath a banner that urged, “Finish the Wall!” Never mind that the wall is not even begun, and likely never will be; never mind that Mexico, despite the President’s oft-repeated promise, is not going to pay for it; never mind the details of the congressional compromise. Trump’s self-protective alternate-reality machine found a way around the facts. “The wall is very, very on its way,” he said on Wednesday. “We are building as we speak.” He added that the nonexistent wall, which is not being finished or even built, would, in fact, be harder than Mount Everest to climb, which instantly became one of those Trump-era tweets that you’re not sure is a joke or something the President of the United States actually said.
Given that this came only a couple of hours after the Washington Post reported that Trump recently installed a “room-sized ‘golf simulator’ ” in the White House, at a cost of roughly fifty thousand dollars, so that he can play a full eighteen holes without leaving the property, it seemed like a moment to remember how tenuous the line between parody and political reality has become in Trump’s Washington. At the very least, it helps explain why the President has so infrequently left the White House this winter.
Meanwhile, not everyone has been taking a vacation from reality, and the nature of the Democratic threat to Trump from the newly empowered House leaders is becoming clearer. This week, two House committees, Intelligence and Judiciary, signalled an aggressive approach to investigating Trump—without waiting for the report of the special counsel, Robert Mueller. House Democrats “plan a vast probe of Trump and Russia—with a heavy focus on money-laundering,” as Mike Allen declared in his Axios morning newsletter, reporting from a briefing, which we both attended, with a House Democrat. Trump “is not in a position to draw red lines” and block Democrats from looking into his finances, the member told a roomful of reporters. The House Democrats’ investigation could include the financial dealings of Trump and his family not only with Russian interests but also with Saudis and other Gulf states. On the House Judiciary Committee, the new chairman this week hired two well-known Democratic lawyers who have publicly led the calls for an obstruction-of-justice investigation of Trump, which could lead to his impeachment.
A new conventional wisdom seems to have formed in recent weeks that the Mueller investigation is all but over, that it won’t be the knockout blow to the President many Democrats had anticipated, or that it may become the subject of an enormous fight with the Trump Justice Department over even transmitting its conclusions to Congress. Impeachment, while supported by the Party’s base, is unlikely to happen—or so this line of reasoning has it. But this week’s developments suggest that another course is possible: emboldened Democrats are neither waiting for Mueller nor limited to whatever it is that Mueller finds. The investigations of Trump are happening, and for now, at least, they are more real than his wall.
