Monday, January 28, 2019

Robert Kuttner: Starbucks CEO May Run for President

I’m sharing this e-mail I recently got from American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner warning that Starbucks’ founding CEO, Howard Schultz, may run for President in 2020 as an independent on a socially liberal, economically libertarian platform. Kuttner is worried both that he’ll take enough votes from the Democratic nominee to re-elect Trump as a minority President and that Schultz will win himself and pursue his Right-wing economic agenda, including opposition to minimum wage increases, from the White House. Be warned!

JANUARY 28, 2019
Kuttner on TAP
We Need Howard Schultz to Run for President Like Starbucks Needs Cockroaches. It was inevitable that some socially liberal, economically center-right billionaire would run for president. So Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, has nominated himself.
This is sheer poison. His story, that voters are hungering for a moderate who can solve problems, is malarkey. Here’s what Schultz told The New York Times:
“We have a broken political system with both parties basically in business to preserve their own ideology without a recognition and responsibility to represent the interests of the American people,” Mr. Schultz said in the interview.
“Republicans and Democrats alike—who no longer see themselves as part of the far extreme of the far right and the far left—are looking for a home.”
No, Howard, we don’t have a “broken political system.” We do have a broken economic system.
Politically, we have wall-to-wall Republican obstruction. And after three Democratic administrations that were far too Wall Street-afflicted, we are finally recovering a Democratic Party committed to working to benefit regular Americans.
Schultz could really screw that up. He is a social liberal who opposed Seattle’s $15 minimum wage—just what we don’t need. The political problem is that lots of suburban moderates, who defected to the Democrats in 2018 out of disgust with Trump, could vote for a guy like Schultz. And in a three-way, Trump could even get re-elected.
There is a long and depressing history of independents running as spoilers. The only time it broke to the advantage of the Democrats was in 1992, when the whacko H. Ross Perot took more votes from George H.W. Bush and helped Bill Clinton get elected with just 43 percent of the popular vote. In 2020, it would help Trump, because his hard-core 35 percent is not going to defect to support a Seattle latte billionaire.
There is already some chatter on social media about a Starbucks boycott. I’m not sure that would do the trick—he’s no longer CEO—but a billionaire centrist proposing to save America from Trump is the last thing America needs in 2020.

Starbucks has a history of creating demands for products that consumers didn't know they needed. They should gag on this one. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Sunday, January 27, 2019

Shutdown Chicken II: Trump Swerves

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Well, the game of “shutdown chicken” in Washington, D.C. — and the collateral damage throughout the U.S. as airports closed, planes deliberately slowed down so they wouldn’t crash into each other, the FBI had to hold back on drug enforcement because they didn’t have the money with which to buy drugs from major dealers so they could arrest them, and the members of the Border Patrol — the agency that’s actually supposed to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and stanch the alleged overflow “caravans” that are, at least in the minds of President Trump and his most fervent supporters, trying to crash it — weren’t getting paid is over. And, much to the surprise of a lot of people (including me), it was Donald Trump, not Nancy Pelosi, who swerved his car and therefore avoided a crash at the last minute at the risk of looking like the “chicken” and losing the game.
Not that President Trump is done with his threats to hold the entire U.S. government — and the population it serves — hostage over his mad plan to build the monument to himself he calls “The Wall” (always in caps in his tweets). When he made his capitulation statement on the morning of Friday, January 25 he talked for about half a minute about his promise to sign a continuing resolution to reopen the government for three weeks without any guarantee of funding for the Wall — not the $25 billion he asked for in the last budget, when Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress; not the $5.7 billion he had named as his bottom-line figure for this budget. To use a Spanish word that would particularly irk him in this context, nada.
Then he went into a 20-minute rant that was sort of an extended jam on the White House Oval Office TV speech he had made during the shutdown to try to gin up public support for it, including horror stories about drug smugglers and human traffickers driving up and down the border, past the official ports of entry (which actually are the ones most real-life drug smugglers use, as House Speaker Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer mentioned in their immediate response), until they find the place the existing fence stops and turn either right or left to enter the U.S. and start raping women and knocking off cops. Delivering this by-now tiresome spiel, Trump came off like Mick Jagger singing “Satisfaction” for the 5,000th time and sounding as bored with it as the rest of us.
Trump climaxed his jam-band freakout with the threat that if the House-Senate conference committee currently meeting to reconcile the differences between the Homeland Security budget passed by the Senate (which includes wall money) and the House (which doesn’t) doesn’t advance a recommendation that has the Wall in it, he’ll either shut down the government again (not likely, given the egg he’s got on his face now for shutting down the government for 35 days and then reopening it on the same deal he could have had with no shutdown at all) or will declare a “state of emergency” that will allegedly give him the power to raid other government budgets and build the wall whether Congress approves funding for it or not.
The “state of emergency” declaration no doubt appeals to Trump’s well-documented hatred of democracy and his fond wish that he could be an authoritarian dictator like his mentors and role models — Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jiaoping of China, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Victor Orbán of Hungary et al. In the later stages of the shutdown the Trump administration announced plans for his second summit with Kim Jong Un, and I could readily imagine Kim asking Trump in private, “Why do you put up with this damned Pelosi woman? Why don’t you just have her killed? That’s what I would do!”
But — at least so far, with a lot of judges in the federal courts appointed either by Democratic or reality-based Republican Presidents rather than Trump and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in his quest to pack not only the Supreme Court but the federal court system in general — there are enough federal judges who take their oath to the Constitution seriously that a “state of emergency” declaration would probably be held up in court for at least two years. No doubt the Supreme Court, ruled by five hard-Right justices (two of them Trump appointees bulldozed through the Senate by McConnell’s scorched-earth tactics) will rule in Trump’s favor if they ever get the case, as they did on the Muslim travel ban and the ban on Transgender people in the military — but it’ll take time for the cases to work their way up to the Supremes, and hopefully in two years Trump will no longer be President and our long national nightmare will be over.
That’s why Trump behaved the way he did during the shutdown. He didn’t really want to declare the “state of emergency”; he wanted to scare the Democrats into thinking he’d do so in order to get them to issue the humiliating capitulation and decide $5.7 billion for a useless boondoggle was worth it to get the government reopened and its employees on salary again. Instead it was Trump who caved — leading Ann Coulter, one of the troika (along with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham) who talked Trump out of signing the continuing resolution to keep the government open last December and into shutting it down instead, to tweet, “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”
Why? Because it didn’t escape Trump’s notice that, while both the bills to end the shutdown Mitch McConnell finally let the Senate vote on Thursday, January 24 — the Democrats’, which didn’t fund the wall; and Trump’s, which did — lost (thanks to the ridiculous 60-vote threshold for the Senate to pass most legislation, established by the loathsome “virtual filibuster”), the Democrats’ lost by fewer votes. Six Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the Democratic bill (versus only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who voted for Trump’s), and it would only have taken seven more to pass the bill and seven more than that to override if Trump vetoed it.
Trump probably also got the message loud and clear that McConnell was having a harder and harder time holding the Senate Republicans in line on the shutdown votes. Word leaked to the media that at one meeting of the Senate Republican Caucus, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin had almost come to blows with McConnell as he asked, “Why are we doing this?” McConnell supposedly replied, “Do you think I like this?” Republican Senators running for re-election in 2020 in states Trump barely carried (like Wisconsin) didn’t like the idea that their Democratic opponents might be playing back video of Trump enthusiastically endorsing the shutdown, and they themselves enthusiastically endorsing Trump, in their TV commercials and online posts in the campaign.
But I suspect what really went haywire for the Republicans is that on Friday morning, January 25, the shutdown finally started to affect the 1 percent in real and measurable ways. They obviously didn’t care whether it affect anyone else, as witness the bizarre advice that kept coming from Trump and his Cabinet officials and staff on how the federal workers should cope with being forced to work, but not being paid, during the shutdown. Trump himself said they should make “arrangements” with their grocers to get food on credit — as if most Americans still stopped at tiny neighbor-owned grocery stores whose proprietors knew them personally.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — known as the “King of Bankruptcies” because in his previous career running a hedge fund he made money for himself and his investors by buying troubled companies that had been driven into bankruptcy (often by the mismanagement of previous hedge-fund managers and so-called “activist investors” who routinely loot and destroy valuable, functioning businesses to steal their assets and make themselves richer) — told the government workers they should take out personal loans. He ignored not only the difference between his multibillionaire self, who can call his friendly bankers anytime and get a bridge loan to shore up his cash flow, and the rest of us, but also the general investment advice noted by David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times that when you’re in financial trouble the last thing you should do is take out loans.
There were other similar statements from Trump economic advisors, including one who said the unpaid federal workers should look upon the shutdown as a “vacation” (actually for at least half of them it was the opposite of a vacation — instead of not having to work but still getting paid, they weren’t getting paid but still had to work), that made Marie Antoinette sound like an Occupy speaker by comparison. Not that Trump would have minded that. He’s enough of both a narcissist and a sadist that he enjoys inflicting pain on other people as long as he doesn’t have to suffer any himself.
Trump clearly agrees with George Orwell’s definition of “power” as “the ability to make others suffer/” In 1990 he said nice things about the Chinese government which had just ordered their troops to fire on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak ... as being spit on by the rest of the world.” (Playboy, March 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990.)
Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart has described Trump’s attitude towards other people as “gleeful cruelty,” and those who claim that Trump “lacks empathy” are missing the point. Trump is proud of having no empathy. He regards compassion as a vice, not a virtue, a pitfall he is determined to avoid with constant projection of “strength” and “toughness.” So the more sob stories that appeared in the media about laid-off or unpaid government workers having to choose between rent and food, rent and health care for their kids, rent and chemo for themselves, the prouder Trump was of causing pain to people who, in Right-wing mythology, are losers who only take government jobs because they don’t have the appetite for risk and the skills they need to succeed in the private sector. Besides, making people work for him without paying them was part of Trump’s private-sector business model, too.
What I think made Trump cave was that the shutdown was finally starting to harm his good buddies in the 1 percent. The morning of Friday, January 25, LaGuardia Airport in New York City — the one usually used by business travelers along the East Coast, and not coincidentally the one at which Trump’s own private airliner is berthed — shut down for an hour because so many air traffic controllers, tired of working long hours with no pay, had “called in sick.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was calling airlines to tell their pilots to fly slower in order to minimize the risk of midair collisions between planes — which air traffic controllers are there to prevent.
All of a sudden the shutdown wasn’t just harming government workers (who will get back pay for their time off the payroll), private-sector contractors who do business with the government (who won’t get back pay, and many of whom may go out of business because of it), and the people newly elected Utah Senator Mitt Romney dissed during his 2012 Presidential campaign as “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Now it was hitting Trump’s peers, the people who are rich and “important” enough that their jobs (such as they are) depend on regular access to safe air travel.
Indeed, it’s ironic that many of the people who suffered most during the shutdown are the very people Trump said he was doing it for. As I pointed out on my Facebook page shortly after the shutdown started, Trump said he was doing it for “border security” and yet he was blocking payment for the Border Patrol, the people who actually provide border security. (He then added insult to injury by appearing on TV with Border Patrol officials and saying the vast majority of Border Patrol agents were supporting him despite the money he was literally taking out of their pockets.) The President of a party which continually disses the public sector and exalts private business staged a shutdown that hurt private contractors doing government business (who won’t get back pay) even more than actual federal employees (who will).
The lessons the government shutdown should teach the American people include: 1) Don’t trust a super-rich man to call himself “the people’s friend.” When push comes to shove, he’s for his own class’s interests, not yours. 2) Experience matters, even in politics. Both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi are 70-something, but Pelosi has been in politics virtually her whole adult life. She knows how the game is played far better than Trump does or ever will. 3) The federal government is yours. It doesn’t belong to the politicians holding office at any moment, or their parties, or some mythical “deep state” of the Right or what I call the “deep ruling class” of the Left. It belongs to us, and it’s our responsibility to keep it working for us by voting for people who are competent to administer it and dedicated to a conception of the public good — and by staying in the streets to keep our politicians accountable and make sure they actually deliver on what they told us they would do.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Shutdown Chicken

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

In the game of “chicken,” two people — usually teenage boys with more testosterone than brains — face off at opposite ends of a deserted road, start their cars and literally drive at each other. If they’re lucky, one of them, the “chicken,” swerves his car out of the way of the other before they crash, with the “winner” who didn’t swerve getting to keep both cars. If they’re not so lucky, they crash into each other and end up dead or severely injured.
The current partial shutdown of the U.S. government, which as I write this (Wednesday, January 23) is at 33 days and counting, is like a game of “chicken” between President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It really began in early December, after the midterm elections that gave the Democrats control of half of Congress but before the January 3 date set for the new House of Representatives actually to convene. President Trump called Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority in the U.S. Senate, to his office and, with TV cameras in the room, loudly and seemingly proudly proclaimed that he was “glad” to shut down the government if that’s what it took to get $5.7 billion dollars to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump promised that he wouldn’t blame the shutdown, if it came to pass, on the Democrats — a promise that, like most of Trump’s promises, he quickly broke. It seemed for a few days as if a shutdown could be at least temporarily averted when the U.S. Senate passed, 100 to zero, a bill to keep the government open for three months while the two big parties continued negotiations over how to secure the border and whether to build a wall. The House, still in Republican hands, balked and instead passed a bill to keep the government open that included the wall money. Trump, who had promised to sign the Senate bill if the House passed it and sent it to his desk, then reneged after a firestorm of criticism from Right-wing media figures Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham accused him of selling out his political base and winning no concessions from the Democrats in exchange.
It didn’t help that the shutdown broke just as Congress was recessing for the holidays and its members were flying home. Washington usually shuts down voluntarily for Christmas and New Year’s, and 2018 was no exception. At one point Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader, threatened to invoke the “nuclear option” and end the two centuries-old tradition of the Senate filibuster so he could pass the House bill, including the wall funding, with the 51-member (now 53-member since the Republicans gained two Senate seats in the 2018 election — which is why I called it “not a blue wave so much as a blue ripple”) Republican Senate majority. But he didn’t; instead he waited until the Democrats took over the House on schedule January 3 and announced that he would not allow the Senate to vote on any bill until he had a signed, sealed and delivered pledge that Trump would allow it to become law.
The shutdown has ground on since then. Over 800,000 federal workers have so far missed two paychecks. FBI agents are organizing food drives for other FBI agents. Trump’s budget director said that the workers should look on it as “a vacation” even though they’re not getting vacation pay, and about half of them — people like Border Patrol agents and Transportation Security Agency airport screeners — have been deemed “essential,” meaning at least in theory that the government can force them to continue to work but doesn’t have to pay them. To me that sounds an awful lot like the “involuntary servitude” the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was supposed to have banned, along with slavery — and indeed I’ve seen one report that a group of “essential” federal workers were planning to sue the government for their money on precisely that ground.
It became pretty obvious early on in the issue discussions that the shutdown was over quite a lot more than a policy dispute over how to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump made the promise to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile border a centerpiece of his campaign, and it’s now become not only a symbol of the kind of America he wants — deeply suspicious of outsiders, as economically, militarily and politically self-sufficient as possible, and governed by white men with women and people of color “knowing their place” — but a monument to himself, the last and greatest Trump real-estate development. As for the Democrats, it’s become about ego for them, too; in her first public statements after the Democrats retook the House and elected Pelosi Speaker for the second time, Pelosi called Trump’s wall an “immorality.”
That was an awfully high card for Pelosi to play that early in the game. Political issues usually can be negotiated and compromised; moral issues can’t. That’s why the U.S. Civil War happened; both sides were convinced that they had the moral high ground. As U.S. President-elect Abraham Lincoln wrote to Alexander Stephens, later vice-president of the Confederacy, in December 1860, “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” More recently we’ve seen activists on both sides of the moral, political and social divides in this country invoke basic moral principles — the Left in the 1960’s in favor of civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam, the Right more recently in opposition to abortion and Queer rights.
By calling Trump’s border wall not merely bad policy — an ineffective boondoggle that will not solve the problems of undocumented immigration, crime and drugs Trump says it will — but “an immorality,” Pelosi staked out a position as intractable and uncompromisable as Trump. And so far she’s been able to keep the House Democrats in line with her. The conventional wisdom is that she’s “winning” the political battle over Trump because polls show a majority of respondents blaming the Republicans in general and Trump in particular for the shutdown.
But what if that changes? If the shutdown goes on for much longer, and the media are filled with more and more horror stories of federal workers having to sacrifice their homes, their children’s health care, and ultimately even their lives (one recent report described a woman who has to choose between paying her rent and paying for her cancer chemotherapy), the U.S. population is likely to shift to blaming both sides for the shutdown and demanding that they reach some sort of compromise before their two cars crash into each other and damage not only themselves but millions of Americans who elected a government to work together and get things done for them, not call each other names and engage in petty squabbles reminiscent of grade-schoolers fighting in a schoolyard during recess.
Indeed, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats got a big fat warning in a recent Civiqs poll showing Pelosi’s favorability rating as 35 percent favorable to 50 percent unfavorable. Trump, in the same poll, did even worse, but that shouldn’t give Pelosi and the Democrats much comfort. When the Democrats won back control of the House in the midterms, the question many pundits were raising was what would they do with it. Would they pass a series of bills to guarantee and improve people’s access to health care — the biggest issue on which they won — and institute other party priorities like infrastructure and a significant response to global climate change? Or would they spend most of their time launching investigations into the endemic corruption of the Trump administration?
Thanks to the shutdown, Democrats have been able to do neither. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who won her House seat by beating a top member of the Democratic House leadership in a primary, told Stephen Colbert on January 22, neither she nor any other of the House’s new members have ever served during a period in which the government wasn’t shut down. In that sense the Republicans have already “won” the shutdown; they still control 2 ½ branches of the federal government (the Presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court) and they’ve been able to neutralize their opposition in the one-half of one branch of government they don’t still command.
It has taken a full month for any hints that either party might be willing to be the first to swerve in this bizarre game of political “chicken.” On January 21 President Trump offered a so-called compromise by which in exchange for his $5.7 billion in wall funding he’d guarantee three years’ protection for the so-called “Dreamers,” children born outside the U.S. who were brought here by their undocumented immigrant parents. The Democrats were already skeptical when Trump made the announcement — they were hoping that the courts, who have already put on hold Trump’s cancellation of the Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program former President Barack Obama put in place by executive order, would finally force Trump to abide by Obama’s program — and vice-president Mike Pence replied that even if the DACA recipients win in the lower courts, the Republican-packed U.S. Supreme Court is likely to do Trump’s bidding and declare the program unconstitutional.
Democrats were even more united against the President’s so-called “compromise” offer when they looked at the fine print in the bill and saw Trump and the anti-immigrant hardliners in his administration had sneaked in language drastically curtailing the ability of people from other countries to apply for asylum in the U.S. It called to mind a deal Trump and the Democrats almost reached last year, when in exchange for full protection, including a pathway to U.S. citizenship, for the “Dreamers” they offered Trump the full $25 billion he had estimated the border wall would cost (though undoubtedly it would go quite a bit higher — up to $100 billion — in predictable cost overruns if it were actually authorized and built). Trump sent signals he’d accept the deal and then reneged, insisting that it also contain drastic cutbacks in legal immigration.
The cutbacks in legal immigration are what Trump is really after on the issue. Like other Republicans, Trump sees that the demographic changes in the U.S. are boosting the share of the country’s population that are likely to vote Democrat: women, people of color, young people, poor people. The Republicans have responded not by trying to broaden the appeal of their party to these groups but by an extensive campaign of voter suppression, gerrymandering election districts, rigging the census so non-Republican populations will be undercounted, and pushing a revival of the 1924 immigration bill (whose supporters pushed it through Congress with openly racist arguments) that slashed legal immigration and set up a quota system that ensured most documented U.S. immigrants would come from white-majority countries.
It’s not “illegal” immigration that Trump and the Republicans hate; it’s immigration, period — especially immigration from Latin America and what Trump calls “shithole” Black-majority countries like Haiti and Nigeria. The wall proposal may have started, as some New York Times reporters have suggested, as merely a memory device invented by Trump’s campaign handlers and speechwriters to make sure he emphasized the immigration issue in all his campaign appearances. But it’s become much more than that. It’s become a symbol of the new exclusionary America he wants to build — a reversal of the Statue of Liberty and its “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” inscription representing the old, inclusionary America. It’s become the monument Trump wants to leave behind, the fact on the ground for which history will remember him and mark the philosophical, historical and ideological distinction between pre-Trump and post-Trump America.
And, for a man who’s been president of the United States for two years and a candidate for that office a year and a half before that but still considers himself a businessman, and thinks of the presidency largely as a way to make more money for himself and his friends, the wall is also a money-making opportunity. As a builder in New York City, Trump had to deal with the Mafia — the real one — which controls most of the contractors in the city and most of the labor unions which supposedly represent their workers. You don’t do as many real-estate deals as Trump has without cozying up to the Mob big-time. And, as Craig Unger noted in his book House of Trump, House of Putin, Trump has been in bed with the Russian Mafia at least since the 1980’s, when Russian mobsters bailed him out by buying units in New York’s Trump Tower and his other buildings as ways to launder their money.
For a man who sees everything as a profit-making opportunity, Trump is no doubt at least partly eyeing the wall as a way he can pay back all the big-money interests, including the crooks in both the Italian-American and Russian Mafias, who financed his private developments and his presidential campaign. It’s a way of making sure Trump, who’s been through at least four corporate bankruptcies, will ensure that the crooks — the sort of people who have been called “the kinds of people you cannot owe money to” — who helped him as a real-estate tycoon and who quite possibly brokered the deals between Trump’s people and the Russian government to win him the presidency in the first place — will get the largesse they’re expecting at the expense of the American taxpayer (now that it’s dawned on even Trump’s thick head that Mexico is not paying for the wall).
And there’s one other reason Trump wants the wall so badly he’s willing to sacrifice the livelihoods of millions of Americans (both the 800,000-plus federal workers who are directly affected and the hundreds of thousands of people who work for private contractors that do business with the government and are not going to be made whole, as the federal workers themselves are likely to be, once the shutdown ends) to get it funded. He wants to deal the Democrats a humiliating defeat and send the message that, no matter how the American people vote, they are going to be governed by his and the Republican Party’s priorities.
It’s not just Donald Trump. As George Packer noted in a December 14, 2018 article posted on the Web site of The Atlantic, “The Corruption of the Republican Party” (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/), the GOP as an institution has fundamentally rejected democracy in the service of an ideological agenda. When they lost gubernatorial elections in North Carolina in 2016 and Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018, the Republican legislative majorities in those states simply rewrote the laws to strip the newly elected Democratic governors of as many powers as they could. As Packer wrote:

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.

As historian Leonard Schapiro wrote of the Bolshevik (later Communist) Party that took over in Russia after the 1917 revolution(s), today’s Republicans are “a minority determined to rule alone.” Their disinclination even to treat Democratic legislators as a legitimate opposition, let alone as equals, was shown when Trump allowed Republican Senators to hold private meetings with Attorney General nominee William Barr but said that “because of the shutdown” Democrats in the Senate would not be similarly privileged.
It’s been noted by a lot of people, including former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res, that Trump’s attitude towards deal-making — the subject of the best-selling book he wrote (or which at least was credited to him on its cover) — is not working out an arrangement that is mutually satisfactory to both. It’s using every bit of leverage he can garner to crush and humiliate his opposition totally. That is what Trump is after in the government shutdown: he wants to force the Democrats to back down on a position that’s very important both to the Democratic leaders themselves and to their political base.
And he’s likely to get his wish. Trump has one huge advantage over the Democrats: they genuinely care whether the government functions properly and whether its workers get paid. He couldn’t care less about that. The character of the Republican ideology is for a government that does as little as possible in the economic sphere — just national defense, criminal justice and a civil lawsuit system to resolve disputes between rich people — and especially doesn’t tax the rich to pay for social services for the not-rich.

As the tales of suffering among federal workers mount, as more and more Americans who don’t work for the government are also harmed by the shutdown, and as the shutdown itself looks more and more like a tit-for-tat routine (Pelosi bans Trump from delivering the State of the Union address in the House chamber, and Trump bans her from taking a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan), there will be far more pressure on the Democrats than the Republicans to end it. This is why I predict the shutdown will end with a total public victory for Trump: he’ll get his wall money, he’ll humiliate the Democrats and he will have effectively neutralized the threat a House of Representatives nominally controlled by the other party could have posed for him.