Among the more alarming revelations of the building fiasco that, now, has led to a shutdown of the federal government on the anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration is just how little day-to-day control Trump seemingly has within his own White House. A month ago Trump's inability to declare a coherent policy position was merely exasperating, for House and Senate leaders; now it has both directly led to a government shutdown and threatens to prolong that shutdown indefinitely.
Trump's inability to articulate the same policy stance from one day to the next is not surprising; we have long known that Trump, whether through a rigorous policy ignorance or a compulsive addiction to flattery, tends to adopt the positions and demands of whichever of his staff members he's last talked to—when he's not lifting them directly from whatever he's watching on Fox News, that is. But the result is that Trump is, regardless of what he says in the meetings, not in charge of his own White House policies. When presented with his own supposed White House positions, in fact, he seems repeatedly surprised by them.
Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security secretary, and her staff passed out a four-page document on the administration’s “must haves” for any immigration bill — a hard-line list that included $18 billion for Trump’s promised border wall, eliminating the diversity visa lottery program and ending “extended family chain migration,” according to the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post.
But one person seemed surprised and alarmed by the memo: the president.
With Democrats and Republicans still in the room, Trump said that the document didn’t represent all of his positions, that he wasn’t familiar with its contents and that he didn’t appreciate being caught off-guard. He instructed the group to disregard the summary and move on, according to one of the lawmakers in the room, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
That was two weeks ago. The White House list of demands has fluctuated ever since, and never in accordance with anything Donald Trump has said. A meeting with Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham collapsed when "they found an angry president, surrounded by hawkish immigration opponents and no longer amenable to the deal he’d praised in phone calls just hours earlier." A Trump tweet-demand that CHIP funding be left out of a new spending bill threatened to short-circuit what little leverage Republicans had left to gain stray Democratic votes.
But it was his pre-shutdown conversation with Sen. Schumer that finally demonstrated just how the White House was being run, as Trump raged and repeatedly switched position. And the sitting president is simply not in charge of his own administration's policy positions.
After a meeting in which Schumer offered up both higher defense spending and funding for Trump's border wall, the two sides looked, if not close to a deal, close to the outlines of a deal. By the next time Schumer and Trump spoke, it had again turned into a non-starter, Trump having been swayed by efforts from anti-immigrant congressmen and, most notably, his own chief of staff.
Trump called Schumer a few hours later and said he understood there was a deal for a three-week measure to fund the government — the first that Schumer had heard of any such deal, according to one person familiar with the issue. At another point, Kelly called Schumer, telling the Democrat that his immigration proposal was too liberal and would not work for the administration.
There are two things at work here. First, Donald Trump has no core principles of his own when it comes to any of the elements of his would-be government funding plan. From wall funding to defense to CHIP to the fate of child immigrants, he is entirely indifferent to the details.
And second, in the absence of those principles Trump has completely delegated his administration's positions to his chief of staff, John Kelly, to whichever of his other advisers Kelly most wants Trump to listen to, and to whichever members of Congress have spoken to him last.
It's not that Donald Trump has a deep insistence on punishing DACA recipients; he doesn't. He's repeatedly, albeit abstractly and with zero follow-through, insisted on a "bill of love" or other iterations of an I-actually-have-a-heart stance. When filtered through his chief of staff, however, those pronouncements go away and are replaced with new hardliner stances. It's not that Donald Trump gives a damn about the once-uncontroversial child healthcare program currently being battled over in the House and Senate; he is told what position to have, and for at least the next few moments has it.
He is a figurehead, and little else. Rather than a consummate deal-maker, he has proven unable to broker even the outlines of a deal because he is unable to control the policy demands of his own staff members.
You can suppose that this is semi-intentional, on his part; that given his own indifference to policy he is utterly reliant on the positions of the hardliners he has surrounded himself with. You could also suppose it is unintentional, and that Trump genuinely wants to be seen as a dealmaking president but is getting regularly played by staff members who are more devoted to forcing the government to follow through on a policy of child deportation than they are devoted to the success or failure of Trump's own presidency.
In either case, it is this seemingly intractable Trump weakness that poses the danger of a long, potentially very long, shutdown. Even at this point, neither McConnell or Schumer can negotiate with Trump or confine him to a stable, readily identifiable position; the hardline positions of his anti-immigrant staff members are so untenable to both Democrats and Republican moderates, however, as to be a non-starter. We are stuck, because Donald Trump cannot control the demands of his own staff. And we'll be stuck until Trump's own staff either successfully sidelines him from the negotiations entirely, thus enabling a consistent (if hardline) position inside the White House, or Trump becomes so enraged by negative news coverage of his dealmaking failures that he sidelines his staff.
The war to fund the government isn't going on in the House or in the Senate, but between Trump and his own advisers. And it may last a while.