Trump reportedly views the border wall fight as his personal Alamo. Remember, the Alamo didn't end well.

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Newsmakers)

published 9 January 2019

President Trump's uphill battle to force Democrats to give him $5.7 billion to start his border wall is "the president's personal Alamo," Gabriel Sherman writes at Vanity Fair. "Trump has told aides he's prepared to stake his presidency on making a last stand," and those aides aren't convinced he'll survive. Trump "has convinced himself he can't win re-election in 2020 unless he gets a lot of the wall built," a former West Wing official told Vanity Fair. "The problem is, the Democrats know that."

"The president put himself in a box," the ex-official added. "The problem is there's no endgame. Right now the White House is at a seven on the panic scale. If this thing goes on past the State of the Union they're going to be at an 11." Congressional Republicans are starting to balk at Trump's insistence on keeping the government partially shut until he gets his money, and a prominent Republican close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Sherman that Trump's handling of the shutdown is "total f---ing chaos."

Trump commandeered prime-time TV Tuesday night to try to convince America there's a "crisis" on the southern border — and "the lack of a wall is a crisis for Trump, of course, because it is his most famous policy goal" and "failure to fulfill it may hurt him badly in 2020," Jonathan Chait notes at New York. He's already failed, argues David Frum at The Atlantic. After his "Oval Office address, little doubt remains of how this shutdown will end. Sooner or later — probably sooner — it will end the way Trump's threats of nuclear war upon North Korea ended: With a sudden Trump about-face. ... Trump, trapped without a decent exit in a predicament of his own making, will yield everything and get nothing."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.