Trump spends Christmas Eve shutdown 'all alone,' tweeting his frustrations

For Donald Trump, a Christmas holiday government shutdown means more time to tweet.

The president spent much of Christmas Eve on Twitter, posting his frustrations with congressional Democrats and the negative media coverage that his shutdown of the federal government has received.

After rejecting a Senate deal that would have funded the federal government through February by demanding that it include include billions of dollars for the construction of a wall on the country’s southern border, the president canceled his trip to Mar-a-Lago and unleashed a tweet storm that extended beyond the weekend.

By turns defensive and defiant, Trump’s 10th Christmas Eve tweet also bore a hint of self-reflection.

While members of the Senate and House departed the capital over the weekend to be with their families, Melania Trump returned to Washington on Sunday, shaving at least four days from a planned 16-day holiday at Mar-a-Lago the first family had planned.

After an especially tumultuous week for the Trump administration, the optics of the president playing golf at his Florida resort were too risky. Instead, Trump used his Twitter megaphone to try to explain why his critics, including soon-to-be former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, were wrong about his governing priorities.

Republican and Democratic senators alike expressed grave concern about Mattis’s departure, which was spurred by Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops from Syria, despite the objections of military leaders and his own defense secretary. Compounding the questions over Trump’s judgment, the president announced Sunday that he would remove Mattis from office two months early, replacing him with Patrick M. Shanahan, a former executive at Boeing. Shanahan will serve in an acting capacity, the third such designation in Trump’s administration.

Another departure that rankled the president came courtesy of Brett McGurk, a man few outside Washington had ever heard of. Like Mattis, the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops from Syria. In a letter obtained by the New York Times, McGurk told his staff that the exit from Syria “left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered.” Trump responded to that criticism with criticism of his own.

Meanwhile, news from Wall Street remained decidedly gloomy, with the Dow shedding 653 points, perhaps in response to perplexing signals sent by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. On Sunday, Mnuchin fired off his own tweet, apparently meant to reassure the markets that all was well with the U.S. economy, despite Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s conclusion that it is poised for a slowdown.

Irate with Powell for a series of modest interest rate increases that Trump claims have hampered the U.S. economy, the president expressed his disdain for the Fed chairman once more.

In the background of Trump’s tweets on Monday: developments in the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with the Russian government and the possible obstruction of justice meant to obscure them. Several news organizations reported over the weekend that Trump had berated acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker for allowing charges to be filed against his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that reflect poorly on Trump. Few things anger him more than anonymously sourced stories that paint a picture of dysfunction inside the White House.

With congressional negotiations at a standstill, and 420,000 federal employees continuing to work despite a possible delay in their paychecks, the president posited that his proposed wall might be built with the windfall he said would result from shuttering the government.

Trump then relayed what he portrayed as more good financial news courtesy of Saudi Arabia, the nation the CIA believes carried out the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and whose war on Yemen has alienated the U.S. Senate.

While darkness had not yet fallen on the nation’s capital, Trump’s Christmas Eve tweet storm slowly abated. Leaving a nation to wonder when the next message would drop, or whether on this night before Christmas, the stirring of fingers had finally stopped.

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