From Jonathan Bernstein:
We’re now well into one of the longest government shutdowns in U.S. history. The problem this time? It has never made sense for President Donald Trump to force a shutdown over funding for his border wall. So assessing what will come next is, well, difficult. As budget maven Stan Collender puts it in his own analysis: “this is Trump; logic won’t necessarily be the guiding force.”
What Trump has been doing so far is, as political scientist Dave Hopkins points out, following the lead of the House Freedom Caucus. But Freedom Caucus radicals don’t have plans for either policy gains or public-relations wins. What they care about is proving that they’re True Conservatives by differentiating themselves from mainstream Republicans. In practice, that means finding irrational but tough-sounding tactics to endorse.
That’s this shutdown in a nutshell.