Here’s Why Trump is Cheering On the Government Shutdown

Donald Trump is hoping that House Republicans will use the government shutdown to stop the criminal prosecutions against him.

As House Republicans continue to fight over what to include in the spending bill, Trump took to Truth Social late on Wednesday night to instruct them to use this opportunity to defund the Justice Department.

“Republicans in Congress can and must defend all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government,” he wrote. “That is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”

Even if the GOP-led House were somehow able to pass a bill slashing the Justice Department’s budget, it would never make it through the Senate. So, in effect, Trump is cheering on a government shutdown.

In 2019, Trump oversaw a 35-day government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, costing the U.S. economy $11 billion, in hopes of passing a bill allocating $5.7 billion for the construction of a border wall. Trump eventually folded, and the government reopened after nearly one million federal workers had gone without a paycheck for more than a month.

But it seems that experience didn’t teach Trump how ineffective a government shutdown can be. The former president ended his post on Truth Social by telling Republicans to “use the power of the purse to defend the Country.” Of course, what he really wants is for Republicans to once again dangle the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the balance, all in the hopes that he can avoid jail time.