The Week in Washington: A Shutdown With No End in Sight
“She’ll cut your head off, and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.” Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra replied, when she was asked on Wednesday how the new speaker of the house will deal with President Trump. Today marks the beginning of the third week of the partial government shutdown, and Pelosi will need a sharp blade. The president insists he’s got to have a concrete wall, or steel slats, or a fence, or some kind of see-through barrier, while the newly emboldened Dems have promised they will allot not even one cent for this folly. (Well, okay, maybe 100 cents—on Thursday night, when Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Is there any situation that you would accept even a dollar of wall funding for this president in order to reopen the government?” she replied, “A dollar. Yeah, one dollar.”)
Meanwhile, 800,000 federal workers are without paychecks. On Thursday, the president, perhaps upset that Pelosi and company were getting too much attention, shuffled over the pressroom with a few guys from Homeland Security, and once again laid out his Wall spiel, then shuffled out, refusing to take any questions. The next day in the Rose Garden it was a different story—he stood in the cold and parried with reporters for more than an hour, during which he made a number of extraordinary claims: that federal workers are “the biggest fan” of the shutdown; that former presidents have told him they wish they had had the guts to do the same thing (a claim vociferously denied by spokespersons for Bush and Clinton); that terrorists at the southern border barrel through and invariably turn left when they get to America. The most chilling boast was his assertion that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his wall at all—he can declare a national emergency whenever he feels like it, and order the military to start building.
In other news of the week: On New Year’s Day, Mitt Romney penned an editorial in The Washington Post, excoriating the president for his lack of character. (Guess Mittens didn’t feel that way in 2016 when he visited Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, sniffing around for the secretary of state job.) On Thursday, shortly after being sworn in, Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib gave a speech during which she declared “we’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” This caused a predictable uproar, with the president himself averring, “I thought her comments were disgraceful . . . . I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family” —which is pretty rich, coming from a commander in chief who, according to CNN, kicked off his meeting with Democratic leaders the next day “with a profanity-laden opening salvo lasting more than 15 minutes.” (Plus, wasn’t it only last November that he referred to Adam Schiff as “little Adam Schitt”?)
And at a rambling cabinet session on Wednesday, the president, whose bone spurs appear to be in permanent remission, mused, “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Well sir, after watching the way you have executed your duties over the last two years, we think we know just what kind of general you would be.
