Day 707: Democrats ready to ramp up pressure on Trump to end government shutdown

There are few ways out of his own self-made mess.

Donald Trump proudly engineered a government shutdown, leading to hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed and hundreds of thousands more to be forced to work without pay around the holidays. While Democrats and Republicans came together and agreed to a continuing resolution, funding the government for the next few months, Trump announced he would veto such a measure if it didn’t include border wall funding.

To no one’s surprise, there’s no appetite for that, despite all of Trump’s tweeting.

With the feckless Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) set to give up the gavel to Democrats on January 3, it’s only a matter of time before the pressure ratchets up even more on Trump.

House Democrats are expected to quickly pass a spending bill — either an entirely new bill or, more likely, the continuing resolution on the table. Then, it will be up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to carry Trump’s water and not allow a passing vote in the Senate, or force Trump to sign or veto such a measure.

The longer a shutdown goes on, the more Trump will be blamed. He even told Democratic leadership, on camera, that it would be his fault if the government shut down, something he has noted is a presidential problem in the past.

He seems to realize that his destined-to-fail plan is doing exactly what most predicted it would. So he’s resorting to his usual string of distortions, lies and made up facts while trying to galvanize a base for an election nearly two years away.

It appears that it’s only a matter of time before Trump vetoes a spending bill that would open the federal government or he is forced to concede on his wall dreams yet again.

707 days in, 755 to go

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