Shutdown politics and Trump’s war on arithmetic

Donald Trump is urging Republicans to avoid negotiating with Democrats on government funding, but without bipartisan support, a shutdown is inevitable.

Donald Trump is out there again, cosplaying as a dictator instead of building consensus to keep the government functioning. According to Politico, Donald told Fox News that he declares Republicans shouldn’t even bother “dealing with them (Democrats)” to keep the government open. Just plow ahead, he suggested, as if politics were an episode of The Apprentice where he gets the final word.

Here’s the problem Mr. Pretend President: math. Basic, first-grade math. Republicans don’t have the votes in the Senate to jam through a spending bill without Democrats. They have to negotiate. That’s not a matter of opinion—it’s how the system works. But the village idiot has always been allergic to reality, especially when it comes wrapped in numbers he doesn’t understand.

This self-proclaimed “greatest dealmaker in history” is the same guy who couldn’t negotiate his way to a functional health care plan, who shut down the government himself in 2018 because he thought temper tantrums were a strategy.