How Trump Conspired with the Freedom Caucus to Shut Down the Government

[DonViejo]

By JAKE SHERMAN and ANNA PALMER April 05, 2019

It was as if Mark Meadows were watching a political car crash in slow motion. In November 2018, when House Republicans lost their legislative majority, it rendered him a bit player in Donald Trump’s Washington. Then in late November and early December, a more paralyzing fear began to creep into his mind: Republicans were going to fold and keep the government open without delivering on the president’s promise to fund the border wall with Mexico. Unthinkable. Unconscionable. He had to stop it.

As he entered a divided government, Meadows believed that finally this was Trump’s hill to die on. “It’s a symbol of the dysfunction of government overall, and it’s bigger than just the wall, and it’s why the two sides are dug in,” Meadows told us in January. “It’s who’s going to decide what happens in the next two years under this administration … We’re trying to figure out who’s going to be the most powerful person in Washington, D.C., and bottom line is, it’s either going to be Nancy Pelosi or it’s going to be Donald J. Trump. And that’s what this comes down to.”

Months after the 34-day standoff that followed, the full story of how the president was pushed into the shutdown is a lesson in how to take the reins in Trump’s Washington. The lawmakers around Trump who wanted a shutdown knew exactly how to bring the president around to their side: threaten that others might perceive him as weak and push that threat around Capitol Hill and, eventually, all the way to Fox News. It helped to have a man on the inside, too—in this case, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. As Meadows was about to find out, following this playbook was enough to get inside the head of the most powerful man in Washington, and use him to get what Meadows and his allies wanted.

With Republican Washington taking its last gasp and Democratic D.C. rearing its head, the president was ready to take the plunge. On November 27, during an interview in the Oval Office for Politico, Trump laid out his demands: He wanted at least $5 billion for his wall and more money for border security.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called each member of his Democratic Caucus to tell them that they could not let Trump get $5 billion. “There’s an endgame,” Schumer said in an interview days before the White House meeting. “January 3, Nancy is going to pass a [funding bill] without the wall, and we will be all for it, and it will be Mitch McConnell keeping the government closed.” He added: “We believe we have the upper hand.”

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/05/jake-sherman-anna-palmer-book-excerpt-donald-trump-paul-ryan-mark-meadows-freedom-caucus-shutdown-226569