Daniel DePetris

There was a time not so long ago when the political establishment of the Republican Party - the Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, and Lindsey Grahams of the world - were strong Donald Trump antagonists.  Trump would utter a racially charged remark about a Mexican-American district court judge being biased against him because he was Mexican, and Speaker Ryan would blast the comment as 'the definition of a racist comment'.  Lindsey Graham, an also-ran in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, acted like a South Carolina preacher with a southern drawl, warning Republican voters of how dangerous Trump would be as Commander-in-Chief.

Donald Trump had a lot to prove during his first ever State of the Union address this week. He had to demonstrate to the millions of Americans watching on television that he could deliver a semi-unifying and presidential speech and stay in one place for more than an hour without diverging into tangents. He had to show his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill that he is a take-charge kind of guy — somebody who has bold, transformational plans for America’s infrastructure and for the country’s immigration system. To Democrats and independents, he wanted to exhibit a kind of conciliatory persona, not one of his favourite character traits.

Compared to previous instances in US history when political paralysis and dysfunction shut down Washington for weeks at a time, the three-day government shutdown that ended on Monday was a rather mundane and unremarkable occurrence.  Indeed, unlike the 21-day saga in 1995-1996 between President Bill Clinton and House Republicans or the 16-day clash between House Republicans and President Barack Obama in 2013, this weekend’s fight had nothing to do with budget numbers, federal spending, tax rates, entitlements, or health care policy.  It was, instead, largely a crisis manufactured by Senate Democrats in an attempt to pressure their Republican colleagues on the immigration issue, one of the most controversial topics in American politics.