Democrats win as Donald Trump caves on threat to shut down government over border wall

| 10:47 pm EDT April 30, 2017
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So much for Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the government if the Democrats in Congress didn’t come up with funding for his Mexican border wall. Trump officially caved this evening, as a bipartisan agreement was reached to keep the government funded through at least September – and that includes no funding for Trump’s mythical wall.

This is a remarkable development, considering that Donald Trump had recently put so many chips down on the gambit of trying to blackmail Democrats into funding his wall, and trying to convince the public that any government shutdown would be the fault of the Democrats. Trump made these overtures via Twitter, but they predictably gained little traction.

Any American who’s in the middle can figure out that Trump and the Republican Party have control of both the Executive and Legislative Branches of the government, so he was never going to be able to convince moderates that any shutdown would somehow be the fault of the Democrats. Trump also looked foolish by asking the Democrats to pay for his wall, after having spent his entire campaign insisting that he could somehow get Mexico to pay for the wall.

This budget deal, as reported by the Washington Post this evening (link), comes even as the Republican majority in Congress still struggles with whether to move forward with yet another attempt at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. Now that they’re in charge, Donald Trump and the Republicans simply don’t seem to know how to govern. Help fund Palmer Report