Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
The government has been shut down for a total of 22 days as of January 13, and unless something drastic changes in the next few days, it’ll be 25 days and counting when this column is printed.
On Sunday, we hit a special milestone, as 22 days beats President Clinton’s 21-day government shutdown. That isn’t a record you want to hold. This shutdown would already have been a harrowing journey if it stopped at 22 days, but as of now there’s no end in sight and the longer this goes on, the more President Trump will lose the faith of the American public — but not from his base voters.
Trump’s political base hasn’t shaken in their support of him since the shutdown started, but the wider American public has. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 53 percent of their respondents blamed Trump and Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, while only 29 percent blamed Democrats (13 percent blamed both sides equally). The way I see it, Trump is only hurting his administration more with each passing day of this government shutdown.
Not only does the shutdown make Trump’s administration look unorganized, but I also don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see funding for a wall come out of this mess. All that Democrats in the House have to do to stop that from happening is continue to press the stalemate in the government and wait and watch one of two scenarios play out: either Trump backs down without funding for his wall or he declares a state of national emergency at our southern border.
Trump has flip-flopped quite a bit in the past week on whether or not he’ll actually take that action, but I think there’s a strong possibility that it could play out that way the longer the shutdown drags on.
My reason for that is because I think fighting for the wall and attempting to deliver on a major campaign promise is more important to Trump than building an actual wall is. Trump cannot appear to be weak, even if now-out-of-work Americans are suffering for it.
The Democrats hold all the cards in this fight except for declaring a state of national emergency. All they have to do is continue to not accept Trump’s demands and propose legislation to reopen the government during border wall negotiations, even if it is legislation that they know the Republicans will shoot down.
The way I see it is that this border wall funding battle is the climax of Trump’s four-year term as president, because this is about the first campaign promise Trump made and one that his supporters latched onto.
Because of this fight Trump is putting up over the wall, he’ll never lose the support of his base. No matter how the battle concludes, his base will always at least see him as the president who tried to build the wall but was stopped by the Democrats.
The people he is losing support from is the rest of America.
I would argue that we’re watching the 2020 election unfold in 2019. Trump is all about winning, and if he wins this, then that speaks to more than just his base. However, the longer that Americans are out of work, Trump’s approval rating among those Americans will fall. If he has no border wall to show for that, then it’s not likely middle America will want more of this past 2020.
