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.
