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1. Great reporting here. What's happening right now with this Trump shutdown is that Trump is playing chicken with the Republicans in the Senate. nyti.ms/2RBlF4w
2. He is daring GOP senators to break from him and fund the government against his wishes.
3. But the problem is (and I'm sure he doesn't understand this) their constituents back home in Alaska or Maine or Colorado are starting to feel the pain of the shutdown and they don't really give that much of a sh*t about Trump's wall.
4. Notice how in 2018 every single house electoral district along the southern border went for the Democrats--the one exception is Will Hurd's Republican district in Texas, and Hurd opposes the wall.
5. The wall's a dumb idea and most Republicans know it, but Trump is fixated on it and won't let it go. It's so central to his brand that he knows that if he doesn't get it, people will see him as a failure.
6. So he's forcing Republicans in the Senate to follow him down this impossible rabbit hole that white nationalists like Ann Coulter have lured him into.
7. This is what Lindsey Graham meant in May 2016 when he said "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it."
8. Lindsey couldn't have predicted this specific scenario, but he knew that Trump stood for wildly unpopular things like "the wall" and that eventually Trump's ego would lead him to force the entire GOP to embrace some nutso MAGA thing that he irrationally insisted upon.
9. Prediction: when the Republicans in the Senate fund the government without Trump's wall, Trump will turn viciously on the ones who abandon him (unless they're able to give him some fig leaf that will enable him to pretend like he won).
10. Trump will back MAGA primary opponents against folks like Gardiner, Collins, & maybe even McConnell, & those primary opponents will win the primary & then likely get slaughtered in the general like Roy Moore or some of the other MAGA "winners" (i.e. losers) Trump has backed.
11. One possible way out of this would be for McConnell to get gov't funding votes only from GOP senators who are NOT up for reelection in 2020 and are thus more insulated from Trump's attacks.
12. Regardless tho, the war between Trump & the GOP does not bode well for folks like Murkowski (Alaska), Collins (ME), Gardiner (CO), Tillis (NC), Perdue (GA), or Kyl's seat (AZ) which are up in 2020. The GOP stands to be seriously weakened in 2020.
13. As @TheRickWilson points out here...Trump could care less about the fate of the GOP. With Trump, it's always about Trump first, everyone and everything else second.
14. What makes Trump's brinkmanship with his own party perplexing, however, is that this is happening at a time when Mueller's report might show up at any moment, possibly triggering impeachment proceedings.
15. Trump, like the mob boss that he is, has picked this wall fight right now as a test of GOP loyalty in preparation for impeachment. He's trying to enforce his dominance over the ppl who will hold his fate in their hands, the 20 or so GOP Senators it would take to impeach him.
16. I think Trump is also seeing this as a trial run for how his base will treat GOP defectors...if GOP senators let Trump down on the wall, what sort of backlash will they feel from the MAGA base?
17. My guess is that Trump expects there to be a massive backlash, something that will scare such folks into toeing the line in this instance and in all future instances where Trump's power, over both the GOP and the nation, might be threatened.
18. He's in a really weak position not just on the wall, but also in relation to Mueller. Trump knows what his campaign did and he knows it's bad...I mean, the stuff that's come out just through public reporting makes Whitewater or Monica Lewinsky look like a parking violation.
19. So he's got to know that something major is going to drop soon...so like the blustering, serial two-bit criminal that he's been all of his life, he's going to try to muscle his way through it by intimidating and threatening whoever needs to be brought to heel.
20. This was the test of the GOP that Graham instinctively knew would be coming...that Trump would eventually ask the GOP to choose between backing Trump, or the Constitution and the rule of law.
21. This whole shutdown thing is a trial run for that impending and far more monumental choice a couple dozen Republican senators will most likely have to make but which they have been trying to desperately avoid.
