For a month now, Trump and McConnell have prevented all efforts at passing a continuing resolution to fund the government. To do so Trump is holding hostage the livelihoods of 800,000 federal workers. His reasoning is that Democrats should include in that continuing resolution funding for his re-election wall.
If anything, the current stalemate demonstrates that Trump could not care less about the travails of a group of middle-class Americans. According to Trump, he is standing on principles–national security. And those principles have led him to withhold payment to 800,000 Americans. It is unconscionable to withhold money from people who have worked without compensation and that have nothing to do with the building of a wall on the Southern border. But this is the Trump way of swindling workers and the way he has conducted business in the past.
As explained in Vox, Democrats have few reasons to trust Trump in the first place. How can anyone trust Trump and his innumerable lies?
The crisis will only deepen as Trump continues to paint himself into an ever smaller corner. Under a normal presidency this shutdown would have been solved already. But with Trump, we get anything but normal.
If a President had been under investigation by the FBI for possibly being a stooge for the Russians, that President would make clearing their name a top priority. A “normal” President would clear the air of everything else (i.e., they would end the shutdown because it would be a distraction) and would make it their mission to address any and all issues that would have led the FBI to initiate an investigation in the first place. This is what a normal President would do because trust is the currency of leadership.
But the shutdown presents an opportunity to discuss anything but the glaringly important fact that no modern American politician, let alone a President, has ever been under suspicion of working for a hostile foreign government. One possible smoking gun is the fact that there are no official records of what Trump has discussed with Putin in any of their five separate private meetings. This means that only the Russians have any record of what the President of the United States told Putin. Were it not for the stalemate, the focus would rightly be on Trump’s increasingly questionable–and possibly treasonous–contacts with Russia.
While it is fundamentally wrong to extend the shutdown for one day longer, the truth is that these facts will not go away. Even without the Mueller report, Trump will be investigated and it is only a question of time before the House has Trump’s minions under oath to find out exactly everything they know about Trump and his Russian connections. What the Democratic House has to do is demonstrate that it can walk and chew gum at the same time: that it can both investigate Trump and push the agenda that won it the majority last November.