Government shutdown

The DC media complex is not happy with the partial shutdown of the federal government. The government shutdown drags into the New Year, they tell us! It could go on for the rest of January, they cry! ‘Promise?,’ is the only thought that readily comes to my mind. It’s actually been quite peaceful with Congress gone and the bureaucracy on furlough. But to be completely frank, while a complete shutdown of the federal government has some impish attraction both in reality and as a thought experiment, that’s not what’s happening.  Still, if the shutdown extended into say February or March or beyond, how quickly would state and local government pick up the slack? What about private enterprise and community-based organizations?

Donald Trump is trashing America. Garbage is piling up from California national parks to the Washington mall as Trump insists on keeping the federal government shutdown over his request for a totemic border wall. The longer he’s cooped up in the White House, the crazier his pronouncements seem to become. Once upon a time a defiant Trump declared, ‘I am proud to shutdown the government.’ He figured this would be enough to scare Chuck and Nancy into compliance. It didn’t. Instead, they were emboldened. Schumer, who previously offered Trump a cool $25 billion in wall money in exchange for liberating the Dreamers, isn’t budging. And Pelosi is openly scoffing at him.

The resignation of Defense Secretary James N. Mattis was only a matter of time – President Trump referred to him as ‘sort of a Democrat’ in October – but it could hardly have come at a more turbulent moment. Earlier on Thursday the Dow was once again crashing. Washington was headed toward a shutdown over the $5 billion that Trump has demanded for a border wall. Then came the resignation letter of Mattis, widely seen as the last ‘adult in the room,’ as the phrase had it, in the Trump administration. Now that Trump has disemboweled his national security team, he, and he alone, will bear responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

Sometime back in the Pleistocene Era — that is to say, round about 2015 — a frequent criticism of Donald Trump was that he wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative. He was an ‘opportunist,’ you see, someone who blithely changed his position on exigent issues — abortion, government run health care, etc. — and even his political party to suit the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist. There is something to that charge, but the more interesting question is whether it counts as a criticism or a commendation. The poet William Blake was not exactly a political sage. But his observation that an honest man may change his opinions but not his principles is relevant here.