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The shutdown fight is over, for now, with President Trump and his allies having suddenly and humiliatingly agreed to the original offer presented to them by Democrats more than a month ago.
Trump's unilateral shutdown surrender came after one of the worst weeks of his presidency. A scallywag and longtime associate of Trump named Roger Stone was arrested in a predawn FBI raid
and accused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of serving as the go-between for the Trump campaign and purloined Russian dirt peddler WikiLeaks during the summer of 2016. And then an apparent
wildcat strike by air traffic controllers in Philadelphia and New York brought the airline industry to its knees in a matter of hours.
Having accidentally accomplished more for organized labor in a month than national Democrats have in a generation, and with his polling continuing to disintegrate, Trump had no choice but to
reopen the government, a move he announced in a strange, delusional statement in which he promised either to shut down the government again in three weeks or to unconstitutionally declare a
national emergency. He and his genuinely hopeless advisers are badly wounded, huddled together like Robert Redford and Paul Newman at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, trying
to decide whether to get captured or to go out in a hail of bullets.
Republicans did not lose this fight because Trump is, as Ann Coulter put it caustically on Twitter, "the biggest wimp ever to serve as president." Nor did they lose because he stupidly
invited his adversaries onto national television and told them he would take full responsibility for the pointless, economically ruinous mess he was about to make. While he managed to put
his own, uniquely humiliating spin on a political catastrophe, the outcome would have been the same even if Mike Pence were sitting in the Oval Office. Republicans lost the wall showdown
because they don't command anything like a national consensus for their policies, and they never will.
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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American
Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.