TWO WEEKS EARLIER, ON the morning of Tuesday, December 11, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi had headed to the White House for what was billed as a private meeting with President Trump. It was to be the first face-to-face encounter between the president and the Democratic leaders since the now infamous “Chuck and Nancy” Chinese-food dinner more than a year before, where the president had nearly cut a deal to preserve DACA, only to be pulled back by his advisers. But now, the Democratic takeover of the House had rotated the political world on its axis, and the three were preparing for an era of divided government, which would require the kind of bipartisan compromises that Trump had mostly been able to avoid during his first two years in office. The president was conflicted about the prospect. On the one hand, he fancied himself a consummate dealmaker, and felt that if given the chance he could strike big bargains with Democrats that would be immensely popular with the public and boost his image. But Trump was also deeply angry about the outcome of the elections and how it was being interpreted—as a rebuke of his leadership and his agenda, particularly his closing argument about the evils of immigration. He was as determined as ever to extract the ultimate concession from the Democrats. He wanted his wall, and he wanted it now.
Ryan and McConnell understood the dangerous dynamics at play. For most of his presidency and particularly the past several months, the Republican leaders had managed, just barely, to steer Trump away from what they considered a disastrous government shutdown fight over money for his border wall. But lately, it had become abundantly clear that time was running out. The president’s patience for signing bills without a huge sum for his signature campaign promise had worn thin. They had averted the shutdown in the immediate run-up to the election, but the chances of preventing it again in the waning days of all-Republican rule on Capitol Hill were 50-50 at best. “Everybody knew that you’re walking a tightrope to pull it off,” a senior aide said.
The last near miss had come in mid-September, just as the president was blazing his way through campaign rallies warning of an invasion of migrants. Ryan had gone to the White House to discuss a stopgap spending resolution with Trump. Yet another deadline was coming at the end of the month for funding the government, and Ryan had to appeal to the president, once again, to support a spending measure to keep money flowing for a few more weeks—until after the November elections—to provide time for a longer-term agreement. Wall money wasn’t in this bill; that would have to wait for another day, Ryan explained. But that was all Trump seemed to care about.
Do you know how I first started talking about the wall? Trump asked the House speaker. Ryan confessed that he did not. The president began reminiscing about how a mnemonic device invented by one of his advisers had, almost by accident, become the animating idea behind his presidential campaign. One of his campaign aides had put the line in a speech—“I will build a wall!” Trump told Ryan, doing a campy impression of himself speaking to a campaign crowd. So he went out there and said it, the president recalled. And do you know what happened? People went crazy—absolutely crazy, Trump said. They ate it up. It was the biggest applause line you can imagine. My people love it, the president told Ryan, and I can’t let them down. I made a commitment that I was going to build the wall, and I’ve got to deliver on it. Ryan said he understood all of that—he wasn’t asking the president to abandon his promise—but a shutdown was not the way to go about achieving it. All a shutdown would do would be to guarantee political defeat going into the midterms, Ryan explained. It would be better to keep talking about the wall and use it as a cudgel against Democrats in hopes of defeating them in the coming elections, the speaker said, so Republicans could be in a better position to push through funding for it when the midterms were behind them. Trump said he would sign that bill, but he was clearly not happy about it.
Now, in the wake of an election that had cost Republicans their House majority, Trump wanted to extract substantial money from Democrats to pay for his border wall. But what exactly did that mean? As ever in Trump-world, the details were murky. Shahira Knight, who had taken over from Marc Short earlier in the year as Trump’s chief liaison to Capitol Hill, told top Republican aides that the White House was coalescing around a stopgap spending measure that would include around $2 billion in funding for the wall. It was more than the $1.6 billion they had requested in Trump’s budget, but Knight said the president would be satisfied with the increase—at least until the new year, when they would have another opportunity to push for more money. But in early December, when Ryan and McCarthy went to the White House to see Trump, he was fixated on a far higher number. He wanted $5 billion for the wall. There wasn’t a clear White House position.
On the morning of Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting with Pelosi and Schumer, the president was spoiling for a battle. On Twitter, he issued a series of lies and threats about the wall, saying that large portions of his “Great Wall” had already been built (they had not), and that even without acquiescence by Democrats in Congress, his administration could continue construction. “People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built,” Trump wrote. “If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!” Trump had been musing privately for months about diverting money from the Department of Defense to build the wall, something that he had repeatedly been told was not possible without express authorization from Congress, which had sole power to allocate money and say how it could be used. Trump had become preoccupied with the idea of transferring revenue collected by government agencies—pots of money that Congress does not control—into a fund to pay for the wall, and administration lawyers were scrutinizing ways for him to do so. They had yet to find a way. No matter what the president said publicly, he was going to need Congress if he wanted that wall.
Schumer and Pelosi, who had met the previous evening to plot out their strategy for the meeting, were prepared to tell Trump that his demand for $5 billion for the wall did not have the votes to pass either chamber. He could have the $1.3 billion Congress had approved the previous year for border security, which included some money that could be used for fixing or extending fencing—no more. Everyone knew that the stakes for the meeting were high. Republicans would continue to hold the House, Senate, and White House for a couple more weeks, but this was to be the initial touching-of-gloves for Trump and the two Democratic leaders, a trio thrown together by political chance and constitutional necessity. Trump, as was always the case, was going from his gut; Schumer and Pelosi had a plan of action for the closed-door confrontation with the president.
There was just one hitch: Trump wasn’t in the mood for a private negotiating session. He wanted a televised confrontation with the newly empowered Democrats. Moments after Schumer and Pelosi took their seats on cream-colored sofas in the Oval Office, Trump invited reporters in for an unscheduled glimpse of the meeting, allowing them to snap pictures and capture video of the three exchanging pleasantries and talking in generalities about legislative business: a criminal justice overhaul that was about to be finalized; an emerging agreement on a farm bill. “And then we have the easy one, the wall,” Trump said, turning to taunt Schumer. “That will be the one that will be the easiest of all—what do you think, Chuck? Maybe not?”
“It’s called ‘funding the government,’ Mr. President,” Schumer answered sharply. He was sticking to the plan that he and Pelosi had cemented the previous evening. They would make it clear that their priority was the orderly functioning of government, and that Trump’s new demands for more wall money would only stand in the way of achieving that goal. The make-nice-for-the-cameras portion of the encounter had obviously ended, but Trump was not dismissing the reporters. With the cameras still broadcasting live, he launched into an elaborate defense of the wall, repeating his lie that much of it had already been built and saying that illegal border crossings were down “virtually 100 percent” in areas where it had been erected. He claimed, without offering any evidence, that his move to shut down the caravan in the weeks before the election had been extraordinarily successful. Then Trump turned to Pelosi to ask if she wanted to say anything. She, too, stuck to the talking points, saying that the public wanted to avoid a lapse in federal funding, but Pelosi also added a dig at the president.
“I think the American people recognize that we must keep government open—that a shutdown is not worth anything,” Pelosi said, “and that you should not have a Trump shutdown.”
“Did you say ‘Trump’?” the president protested. “I was going to call it a ‘Pelosi shutdown.’ ”
Pelosi was having none of it. “You have the Senate,” she told Trump. “You have the House of Representatives. You have the votes. You should pass it right now.” Pelosi tried repeatedly to get Trump to dismiss the reporters in the White House press pool so they could haggle privately over the issue. “I don’t think we should have a debate in front of the press on this,” she said, and then a few minutes later, with the cameras still rolling, “let us have our conversation, and then we can meet with the press again.”
But Trump wanted to have a public fight. “There are no votes in the House—a majority of votes—for a wall, no matter where you start,” Pelosi told Trump, practically daring the president to try to muscle a bill through the House to pay for the wall. She knew that privately, Republican leaders had begun to worry that they would not be able to muster enough votes to pass the bill, with many of their rank-and-file members—particularly those who had been defeated in the midterm elections the previous month—in no mood to return to Washington weeks before Christmas to wage war over Trump’s wall. Trump needled Schumer that he had gotten “killed” so badly during January’s “Schumer shutdown” over DACA that he had been forced to back down in just a day (“I don’t want to do what you did,” Trump said). And the president sought to undercut Pelosi, who had just headed off an internal Democratic rebellion and been nominated by her colleagues to reclaim the distinction as the first and only woman to serve as speaker of the house—a job she had relinquished in 2011 after Republicans took control of the chamber. There were still rumblings that Pelosi would face a challenge in January during the official floor vote, and Trump, ever the bully, went straight for what he considered Pelosi’s weak spot.
“I don’t think we really disagree so much,” Trump said. “I also know that, you know, Nancy is in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now, and I understand that.”
Schumer gazed silently at Pelosi across the coffee table, which was adorned with an arrangement of red roses, and raised his eyebrows dramatically in her direction. “Mr. President,” Pelosi said with barely disguised disgust, wagging a finger as she spoke. “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats who just won a big victory.”
It was clear that Trump wanted to show that he was driving this conversation, and Schumer, sensing an opening, was happy to oblige. Schumer had come to the White House that day armed with a tally compiled by his staff of twenty separate instances in which the president had publicly threatened to shut down the government if he did not get his way on funding the wall. How hard could it be to get Trump, who had invited the press in to watch as he browbeat Democrats over the issue, to say so again?
“You want to shut it down—you keep talking about it,” Schumer said, as Trump objected repeatedly. “You’ve said it… You said it.” Finally, Trump had had enough.
“Okay, you want to put that on my—I’ll take it,” the president said. “You know what I’ll say: Yes, if we don’t get what we want, one way or the other—whether it’s through you, through a military, through anything you want to call—I will shut down the government. Absolutely.”
“Okay,” Schumer said, the look on his face barely disguising his joy at having extracted Trump’s admission. “Fair enough. We disagree.”
Then Trump went even further. “And I’ll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”
When the cameras departed, Trump’s demeanor appeared to change as if with the flip of a switch. Leaning in conspiratorially toward the Democratic leaders he had just sparred with relentlessly on live TV, the president brightened considerably and said he was eager to work with them in the second half of his term to strike great deals. The new Congress could be the “greatest Congress in the history of Congress,” Trump told Schumer and Pelosi. And don’t worry about Mitch, Trump told them, speaking of McConnell; if they could compromise on measures that could get through the House, he would force Republican senators to back them so he could sign them into law. Was this the same president who had said just minutes before that he wouldn’t even agree to fund the government unless Democrats agreed to his demands for a border wall?
Even as he tried to make nice with the Democrats privately, Trump was still spouting misinformation and threats about the wall. If they wouldn’t agree to fund it, the president told Pelosi and Schumer, Mexico would pay for it through money that would flow into the United States as part of a new North American trade agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. That’s never going to happen, Schumer said. The agreement still had to pass the House, Pelosi pointed out, and besides, any economic gains from it should go to American workers and businesses, not a border wall. “Well,” Trump insisted, “they’re going to pay for it one way or the other.”
The Democrats had another idea. Trump’s attempts to win wall funding would fail, they assured him, and the government would suffer a partial shutdown, as he had just publicly threatened it would. Then when Pelosi took over as speaker of the house in January, her first order of business would be to pass legislation to reopen the government, essentially daring the Republican-led Senate to reject it. “What do you think Mitch will do?” Schumer asked Trump. “Keep it shut down another month? Another week?” Trump sat silently, pondering the thought.
At the White House and in Republican offices on Capitol Hill, Trump’s performance was met with rueful shakes of the head and shrugs. The president had just made a shutdown more likely, and preemptively taken credit for what was certain to be a politically damaging outcome for his party—and all over a border wall that most Republicans did not consider to be worth the trouble. What was worse, Trump did not seem to comprehend what he had just done, or have any sense of urgency about extricating himself from the predicament. Following the meeting, as she commiserated with senior Republican officials on Capitol Hill about the televised debacle, Shahira Knight, Trump’s liaison to Congress since July, reported perhaps the most unbelievable piece of all. “He thinks it went really well,” she said. The president, she said, “thinks it went spectacularly.”
Democrats shared that assessment, but for very different reasons. On his way out of the West Wing, Schumer stopped to tell reporters that Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum” over this wall. Video of Pelosi striding out of the White House in a red cashmere coat and donning a pair of sunglasses with a grin went viral and spawned dozens of GIFs, solidifying a public sense that the session had been a moment of triumph for her. When she returned to Capitol Hill, Pelosi met privately with senior Democrats and regaled them with a mocking description of a president she described as unhinged and toddler-like.
“This wall thing,” Pelosi told her colleagues, is “like a manhood thing for him—as if manhood could ever be associated with him.”
“I was trying to be the mom. I can’t explain it to you—it was so wild,” Pelosi recounted, painting the remarkable scene even as she chose her words demurely. “It goes to show you, you get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.”
The following day, Ryan received a call from Trump. They had much to discuss. How were they going to play this government funding debate with Democrats now that Trump had admitted publicly that he was the one courting a shutdown? It seemed like a no-win situation. But Trump, true to Knight’s description, was ebullient. Did you see how great the ratings were for that Oval Office meeting? Trump asked Ryan. The speaker was dumbfounded. They have ratings for that already? he asked. Oh sure, the president told him, they have ratings for everything. This is why people loved me on The Apprentice, Trump told Ryan. Because people love the drama that I create.
That may have been true of viewing audiences across America. It was not true of Republicans on Capitol Hill, who had ten days to find a way to push through spending legislation before a partial shutdown three days before Christmas. The White House had no plan for how to resolve the impasse, and Ryan was having a hard enough time keeping his rank-and-file members in Washington following a crushing electoral defeat that had swept a large portion of them out of their seats, rendering them lame ducks. They were sick of Washington, sick of looking at each other, sick of showing up to cast votes on legislation that might not have any chance of passing the Senate. Ryan decided to shutter the House of Representatives for nearly a week, until there was something to vote on—or at least a plan of action.
On December 17, just days before Nielsen’s hearing before House lawmakers, she and Pompeo went to the White House to brief Trump on their emerging deal with the Mexicans. Trump was irritated. He didn’t like the deal, and he was particularly livid about the $10 billion aid package, of which Mexico would get about half, the rest going to the three Central American countries. He had been telling people for years that the Mexicans were going to pay for his border wall; the last thing in the world Trump wanted to do was have to pay them $5 billion instead. Pompeo tried to explain that a lot of the money was private investment—American companies going down to Mexico would turn a profit and create jobs. And he and Nielsen told Trump that the aid package was essential if he wanted the rest of the deal to go through. It is the only way we are going to get Mexico to take back large numbers of migrants, they said. Showing little enthusiasm, Trump reluctantly agreed.
By the next day, however, he was furious again. In another meeting with Nielsen and her staff, Trump trashed the agreement with Mexico. I don’t want to do it, he told his aides. I want to close the border. “Let’s stick it to the Mexicans.” By then, it was too late. The agreement had been finalized, and word had begun leaking out about the aid package, which the Americans had agreed would be made public first. The timing could not have been worse. Just that morning, in an interview on Fox News, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, had signaled that the president might be willing to back down on his demand for $5 billion for the border wall, the first indication that Trump might actually blink in his standoff with Congress and steer clear of a government shutdown. Conservatives were up in arms. Now that it had gotten out that the United States had agreed to send nearly that much aid to Mexico, the outrage factor shot up exponentially. The right-wing website Drudge Report ran a headline that blared, “WALL FUNDING OFF TABLE. U.S.A. GIVING $4.8 BILLION TO MEXICO.” Someone printed it out and handed it to Trump.
The president blazed into a rage. “My fucking friends are calling me,” he yelled. “This is the stupidest shit you’ve ever done. Why the fuck would we do this? I’m not getting $5 billion for the wall, and instead I’m paying Mexico $5 billion? What the fuck am I getting out of this?” Trump’s team spent the next several hours frantically trying to tamp down another presidential blowup. The last thing they needed was for Trump to see Drudge’s story line reinforced and echoed on every news program he watched that night. Taylor, Jared Kushner, and Bill Shine, the former Fox News executive who had been installed over the summer as White House communications director, began working the phones, calling every producer at every conservative TV outlet they could think of and begging them not to run with the Drudge headline. There was more to the story, they promised. Please trust us.
It hardly mattered. Later that night, Trump told his staff that he was going to tweet against the Migrant Protection Protocols deal and blast the State Department for giving money to Mexico, announcing that he was taking the money back. Pompeo called Trump to implore him to reconsider. We are on the precipice of this thing, he said. Let’s give it a chance to work.
On Capitol Hill, Mitch McConnell was single-mindedly focused on trying to avert a government shutdown, and had decided to take matters into his own hands. There was no clarity from the White House on what Trump would accept, but it seemed as if the president was at least open to the idea of dropping his demand for $5 billion in wall funding. Sanders’s interview had been a hopeful sign, signaling for the first time that Trump was looking for ways to avoid a shutdown. McConnell began making arrangements for a bill that would simply postpone the debate to the new year—a short-term spending measure to keep the government open until early February, while lawmakers and the president continued to haggle over border security.
In the age of President Trump, Sharon Soderstrom, McConnell’s chief of staff, kept a calendar in her office with roller coasters on each page, one for each month, and she would pull it out from time to time and say to colleagues, “Here’s today.” December 19 was one of those days. There were about forty-eight hours before the deadline to fund the government, and McConnell was about to make a last-ditch effort to get Trump to accept a bill without his $5 billion for the wall. That day, Pence had come to Capitol Hill to huddle with Senate Republicans at a lunchtime gathering just off the Senate floor. You’ve done a great job this year, the vice president told the Republican senators, and the president really appreciates it. McConnell, who had met privately with the vice president, briefed the senators seated around the rectangular wooden table about his plans for a temporary funding bill. His understanding from the vice president, McConnell told his colleagues, gesturing at Pence, was that the president is going to support this. Pence said nothing, but nodded his head slightly as if to acknowledge what McConnell had just said. Republican senators left the meeting with the distinct impression that Trump was on board and would sign the measure.
But McConnell knew better than to be certain of anything when it came to Trump. The Senate leader had two overriding instincts about dealing with this president. First, McConnell was only ever as confident as his last conversation allowed him to be. In this case, his last conversation with Pence had left him confident that Trump would sign the spending bill. McConnell’s other rule of thumb was that when he thought he had a deal that was workable, he needed to act quickly to lock it in before the president could change his mind. The idea, as described by someone close to McConnell, was, “Move fast, because we might wake up the beast.”
McConnell’s staff spent the rest of the day quietly laying the groundwork for speeding the spending bill through the Senate without any fanfare and without a roll call vote. If the president was going to turn around and veto this bill, McConnell did not want Republican senators to have to go through the politically risky exercise of casting a vote in favor of it, putting them in danger of drawing the wrath of Trump’s wall-obsessed base. His strategy worked; as the hours ticked by, nobody registered an objection. And just after 10 p.m., McConnell asked for—and received—unanimous consent to pass the measure. In the blink of an eye, with no debate or dispute and before most senators could figure out what was happening, the famously sluggish Senate had given lightning-fast approval to a stopgap spending bill to avert Trump’s promised shutdown. Republican officials were stunned and relieved when Democrats did not request a roll call vote that would have forced their members to go on the record on whether they supported the move.
Now the ball was in Ryan’s court, and it was still unclear whether the president would accept the measure. The Senate bill was causing a mini-revolt in the House, where conservative members of the Freedom Caucus were up in arms about it. If Trump signed the Senate bill, they argued, he would be selling out his signature promise and relinquishing the last of the Republicans’ leverage in the fight over the wall and other restrictive immigration policies. Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman who ran Trump’s budget office and had recently been named acting White House chief of staff following Kelly’s resignation, rushed to Capitol Hill to meet with the Freedom Caucus. Mulvaney had been one of the founding members of the caucus, which prided itself on being willing to defy Republican leaders and take down legislation its members considered insufficiently conservative. They told him that the president should not, under any circumstances, capitulate. That night, Mulvaney showed up at the Capitol Hill Club to hobnob with his former colleagues. He came bearing an ominous message from the White House. You guys better put up a big Republican number on this bill when you vote on it tomorrow, Mulvaney warned, or else the president might veto it. The message was clear: they could not count on cover from Trump on this vote. If they were going to defy his wishes for a wall, they were taking their political fate into their own hands.
Early the next morning, just before heading into a closed-door meeting with House Republicans in the Capitol basement, Ryan placed a call to Trump. If he was okay with the temporary spending bill they were about to vote on, the president was going to have to say so publicly, thereby ending the debate within the party about whether or not to support it. But the president was unreachable, so Ryan went into the meeting without any idea what to tell his members. As it turned out, the issue was moot. As the gathering unfolded, lawmaker after lawmaker rose to register dismay over McConnell’s stopgap measure in the Senate, saying they should back the president’s demands for a wall. Some lawmakers even called for votes on a far-reaching immigration overhaul that would impose new restrictions and sharpen Trump’s crackdown. Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows and other members of his group said they should stand and fight for the president’s immigration agenda now—not after Democrats take control of the House in the new year. We’re starting out the day in a hole, Republican officials said privately. People don’t want to vote for this thing.
As the discussion grew more tense, Ryan’s cell phone rang. It was Trump returning his call, and the speaker stepped out of the Republican Conference meeting to take it in a small room down the hall. Ryan cut to the chase. You need to sign the Senate bill, and we need you to make clear that you are going to, he told the president. But Trump was in no mood to do that. This is our moment of maximum leverage, the president said, echoing his conservative allies in the meeting. Now is when we should have this fight, before the Republican majority is gone. Building the wall is an 80-20 issue, Trump said. (That wasn’t even close to true. The public was divided over building a wall on the southwestern border to keep out illegal crossers, and only a fraction of voters—about the same third or so who adored Trump the most—liked the idea of shutting down the government to accomplish it.) Not long after Trump and Ryan hung up, the president used Twitter to take a thinly veiled swipe at Ryan, who had one day earlier given his farewell address as speaker. “When I begrudgingly signed the Omnibus Bill, I was promised the Wall and Border Security by leadership,” Trump wrote in his post. “Would be done by end of year (NOW). It didn’t happen!” It was an ironic ending to Ryan’s career in Congress, where he had always been a quiet advocate for a broad immigration compromise, including a pathway to legal status for millions of undocumented people. Instead of finding a way to negotiate a deal like that, he was spending his last hours in power on Capitol Hill making a futile stand for a border wall. In the midst of the legislative chaos, Nielsen was in an office building just across from the Capitol, announcing the new arrangement for migrants to be returned to Mexico while their cases were heard. Amid the intraparty revolt, it got little attention.
Around noon, Ryan, McCarthy, and Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, went to the White House for a hastily called meeting with Trump. They were accompanied by more than a dozen other House Republicans, including Meadows, who were agitating for Trump to stand his ground and refuse to sign any spending bill until he got more wall money. The gathering in the Cabinet Room was ostensibly about weighing the pros and cons of a shutdown, and Trump made a cursory show of listening to arguments on both sides. But he was soon diverted when one of the lawmakers said Republicans should be debating a whole host of other measures to crack down on illegal immigration, including making it mandatory for employers to use E-Verify, the federal database that checked workers’ legal status. With only hours left until parts of the government were to run out of money, the president launched into his familiar diatribe about the program, rehashing what a pain in the ass it had been to use it while building the hotel bearing his name in Washington. “It’s a disaster!” If it hadn’t been clear before then, it was pretty clear to everyone around the table that a shutdown was happening.
On December 21, the day of the shutdown deadline, things were eerily quiet in the Capitol. These moments were usually times of intense negotiation and shuttle diplomacy between the two parties and the two houses of Congress, in which legislative language was carefully crafted and controversial details were painstakingly ironed out. There was none of that. It was four days before Christmas, less than twelve hours before appropriations expired, and there was very little happening. The House had passed a bill adding $5.7 billion for the border wall, and McConnell had reluctantly called his members back from states around the country to vote on the measure, knowing that it was doomed to fail. From the White House residence, Trump was on a Twitter tear, praising House Republicans for backing him and trying to cast blame preemptively on Democrats for a shutdown. But he also singled out McConnell, instructing him to take extreme measures to push through the wall money, even if that meant changing long-standing Senate rules that require sixty votes to advance most major legislation. “Mitch,” Trump tweeted, “use the Nuclear Option to get it done! Our Country is counting on you.” Several Republican senators quickly issued statements rejecting the idea, and McConnell’s staff shot it down, telling reporters the party did not support it.
In a meeting with Trump that morning at the White House, McConnell reiterated what he had repeated for the president so many times before: The votes simply are not there in the Senate to deliver what you want. McConnell would bring up the bill the House had passed, complete with Trump’s cherished wall money, he explained, but it would not draw anywhere close to the sixty votes needed to advance in the Senate. Trump would soon learn that the news was even worse. The spending bill could not even draw a majority of the Republican-held Senate. For hours on Friday afternoon, as the clock ticked ever-closer to a shutdown, McConnell was forced to prolong what was to have been a standard fifteen-minute-long roll call while senators arrived back in Washington to cast their votes and a pair of Republicans pondered siding with Democrats to block the bill from even advancing to a final vote. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, two of the only Republicans who had dared criticize the president publicly—both of whom were retiring—spent hours agonizing over how they should vote, reluctant to join Republicans in endorsing a measure that was going nowhere. Should they vote no, and force Trump and their own leaders to draft a new version without the wall money? Or would it be better to allow the measure to fail along party lines, potentially paving the way for negotiations that could produce a compromise to break the impasse?
For several hours, with the vote still under way, uncertainty reigned on the Senate floor as lawmakers milled about and held hushed conversations. At one point about two hours in, the Senate clerk, wearing a necklace adorned with miniature Christmas lights in a nod to the season, hunched over the dark green marble dais in the front of the Senate chamber, gazing with puzzlement at a laptop used to count the time elapsed during votes. The overtime clock had reached 100 and did not seem to have the capacity to go any higher. After a few moments, it started counting backward again. Would the bill be allowed to advance or be blocked? It hardly mattered; in either case, there was no way it was going to pass the Senate. And there was no Plan B for what to do to fund the government past midnight.
That evening at the White House, Trump was in the Oval Office signing bills and fuming about the prospect of a shutdown. He had a brief moment of happiness when Nielsen showed him the mock-up she had produced of the border wall Trump had so meticulously detailed to her weeks earlier. And that is how it came to pass that the president of the United States, who had brought the nation to the brink of a government shutdown over funding for his border wall, tweeted out a fantasy version of the edifice that would never be built, hours before government funding lapsed. Around the same time, Flake and Corker decided to side with their party and vote to keep the wall funding bill alive. They voted yes, bringing the tally to a tie, which Pence was on hand to break. After a little over five hours, Pence banged the gavel. The vote was 48–47 to begin debating the bill, but it was now abundantly clear that the votes did not exist to pass it. Trump’s wall had not been able to garner the support of a majority of the Senate. There would be a shutdown, the only question now was for how long.
Jared Kushner was exhausted. The senior White House adviser and presidential son-in-law had spent the past few months quarterbacking quiet discussions with the Mexicans over trade and border issues, and several intense weeks cementing a bipartisan deal in Congress on criminal justice reform legislation. He was eagerly anticipating jetting off to Florida with Ivanka and their three children for some badly needed rest and relaxation over the winter holiday. This squabble with Congress over the wall could wait until 2019, he told colleagues. But his father-in-law had other plans. Trump asked Kushner to cancel his vacation and remain in Washington to negotiate a deal on the wall. Along with Vice President Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the budget director now doing double duty as acting chief of staff, he was dispatched to Capitol Hill that night to try to strike a compromise.
Senior Republican officials called them the “three wise men,” with more than a hint of irony. Pence, Kushner, and Mulvaney began making the rounds on Capitol Hill that evening without warning. They exuded an air of urgency, eager to lay out for congressional leaders what they believed was a fresh way out of the mess in which they found themselves. Their first stop was Paul Ryan’s ceremonial office, steps from the House floor, where they arrived with Meadows and fellow Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan to pitch a potential solution. Pence, Mulvaney, and Kushner outlined a deal in which they would get a total of $2.5 billion for border security measures, including about $1 billion that Trump could access in the future to pay for his immigration priorities. It was similar to a proposal that Republicans had offered Democrats privately the previous week and they had rejected out of hand. But Trump’s team, particularly Kushner, either did not know that or didn’t care. Kushner seemed particularly confident in his ability to break the logjam. The president’s son-in-law brought up the bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation that Trump had just signed into law earlier that day, which had united an unusual coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Having navigated the tricky politics of that debate, Kushner assured the Republicans that he could cut a deal with Democrats on immigration. Besides, I am completely unburdened by all the history and knowledge you guys have on this subject, he said. Ryan was blunt. We can live with anything the president is willing to sign here, he said. If you can get buy-in from the Democrats, we won’t be your problem. But it was clear nothing was going to be settled that night. As the meeting broke up and darkness fell in Washington around six thirty, the House adjourned, a sure sign that nobody expected a deal before the midnight deadline.
The wise men strode purposefully across the Capitol, where they had requested a meeting with Schumer. Pence told the Democratic leader that they were prepared to accept $2.5 billion for the wall—half what the president was publicly demanding. But Schumer was not in the mood to haggle over numbers. Any measure that includes money for the wall can’t pass the Senate, he said. Take our offer of $1.6 billion for other forms of border security and call it a day. As the haggling continued, Trump was at the White House recording a video.
“We’re going to have a shutdown,” Trump said, standing in front of a pair of flags and a mantelpiece decorated with pine and holly branches. “There’s nothing we can do about that.” Ten days earlier, in the Oval Office meeting whose ratings he celebrated, Trump had told Democrats he’d be “proud” to shut down the government for his wall. Now, though, he shifted blame. It was Democrats’ fault, Trump said in the video, circulated to his tens of millions of followers. As images of brown-skinned men rushing fences and banging on barriers were interspersed with video of crowds of migrants swarming, Trump returned to the same themes he had hit upon two and a half years earlier when he had announced his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower, denouncing Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. The border was a war zone. Immigrants were to be feared. Trump would finally fix it. Now, instead of coming from a long-shot novice presidential candidate in a glitzy office tower, the message was coming directly from the White House and the president himself.
“It’s very dangerous out there. Drugs are pouring in, human trafficking, so many different problems, including gangs like MS-13.
“We don’t want ’em in the United States,” Trump continued. “We don’t want ’em in our country.”
Over the next few days, as the reality set in that the president had plunged the country into what was likely to be a lengthy shutdown with no clear path to resolution, Trump’s best hope at blocking immigrants from entering the country stalled. The deal with Mexico, so meticulously negotiated by Nielsen and her top aides, was in a kind of legal limbo. A partial shutdown meant that many functions of government had to cease, although there were exceptions for certain diplomatic matters and areas that affected life or property. After four days of panicked phone calls about whether the Migrant Protection Protocols fell into either of those gray areas, the verdict came back from the lawyers: it didn’t. While much of the program could proceed, the Trump administration could not issue directives to finalize the deal and put it into practice while the government was partially shuttered.
Trump’s obsession with the wall had, for the time being, effectively stymied his best hope of controlling immigration.