To whatever extent rational calculation plays a part in Donald Trump’s thinking on the shutdown, it would have to be premised on his belief that the Democrats will finally end it lest the toll of the human suffering it causes grow too great. Consider the numbers: The shutdown is not only causing major economic distress for the roughly 800,000 federal workers not being paid, and their families, and the good-deal-more-than-800,000 contract workers who are also not being paid, and their families, too. Add all those up and they have to come to perhaps five million, maybe more, Americans.
But as our Kalena Thomhave points out in her story on the nation’s roughly 40 million food-stamp recipients, who may not be getting their March payment (their still-funded February payment went out early), the human toll of the shutdown could radically worsen if Trump insists on keeping it going.
And the Trump thought process, such as it is, would have to go something like this:
At some point—particularly if those 40 million begin to go really hungry—won't the Democrats be compelled to cave? Because they actually care if people go hungry, and I (Hizzoner President Trump) do not?
Of course, some of my fellow Republicans may wuss out on this. It will be up to my friends at Fox and on talk radio to demonize the food-stampers, but they're up to the task. I may not have my Roy Cohn, but I sure got my Doctor Goebbels.
Despite such calculations—and it's hard to see anything resembling calculations in the White House's strategy other than a version of the above—the public is clearly blaming Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown, and they're likely to blame Trump and the Republicans for mass hunger, too, should it come to that. Even the intransigent Mitch McConnell has lots of SNAP recipients among his voters, as do other Republican senators. Such an impasse would be the clearest test yet of whether anything can make them break from the sociopath in the Oval Office.