President Trump could've given up on his border wall five weeks ago, and the only difference would've been how many American lives he disrupted.
On Friday, Trump announced he and Congress had agreed to a deal to end the longest ever government shutdown, coming after a lack of federal employees had closed one of America's busiest airports. The deal reopens the government until Feb. 15, contains no additional money for a border wall, and basically makes Trump's entire 35-day-long holdout worthless, conservative critics said.
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On their first day in the majority, House Democrats passed wall funding-less bills to reopen most of the government until the end of the year. They would only fund Homeland Security for a month, giving Trump a quick chance to renegotiate his wall. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wouldn't bring them for a vote because he said Trump wouldn't sign them, so the House passed similar bills again to no avail. Rinse and repeat until two Senate bills, one from Trump with his original $5.7 billion desire and one from Democrats with nothing, failed Thursday. Funny enough, the Democratic bill looks awfully similar to the deal Trump publicly agreed to pass Friday.
To break it down, Trump could've had $1.6 billion for border security and made a deal with Democrats in two weeks. But for now, he has nothing but a dismally sunken approval rating and 800,000 federal workers in need of a long-overdue paycheck that totals more than his $5.7 billion wall demand itself.
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