Why wouldn’t Trump carry out his threat to shut down at least the part of the govt funded by the bill (or CR) that does the ACA subsidies?
You can’t imagine that he will hold back because he cares about the practical consequences to the people who depend on one or more of the things that HHS and related agencies do. Not only does he seem to be a world class sociopath, he seems capable of convincing himself that any bad consequences wouldn’t be real anyway. Any such inconvenient truths would be alternative facts invented by the lying media to make him look bad.
Don’t be hypnotized into complacency by the conventional wisdom that shutting down the govt never works, and only succeeds at hurting those who try it. In the past it’s only been tried by legislative majorities, not the president. These legislative coalitions could not be held together in pursuing the high risk, high pressure strategy of legislative chicken, but always swerved first. They always lost. Trump will not swerve. He doesn’t care about the consequences of a crack-up, and/or he can convince himself in the unreality of those consequences. Trump will win any game of legislative chicken he plays against people not as sociopathic and delusional as he is. Trump will win if he goes through with it.
Okay, so he wins on getting funding for his wall. But that’s just symbolic, probably not something he really cares about himself. And to get that victory, he has to poison his ability to get anything done in the future by careful negotiation with Congress, because he will have proven himself an unreliable negotiating partner, a wild man willing to win by hostage-taking. Unfortunately for sane people everywhere, Trump would see that as a feature, not a bug. He doesn’t want to succeed on the model of a conventional politician like no drama Obama. He doesn’t see that as power, the Obama model of getting things done by careful negotiation and compromise. Trump doesn’t have a public policy agenda that he needs to keep legislative friends and allies to help him with. He has instead a personal power agenda that he needs to crush and humiliate legislators of both parties to achieve. Getting funding for a wall that is completely stupid in public policy terms, that none of the careful conventional politicians want because it is stupid, that is indeed just a symbol, is vital for Trump, because what such a victory would symbolize is that Trump is in control. He can get them all to dance to his tune by using tactics that none of them have the cojones to use. Only he dares to shut down the govt and persist in that course until they swerve first and submit to his will.
And once the conventional politicians give in and swerve to avoid a wreck over this purely symbolic expenditure, which, however stupid, is genius compared to other stupid things they vote more money for on a regular basis (I’m looking at you, F-35.), Trump will indeed have established permanent dominance over them. The funding bills, which he can refuse to sign except as short term CRs, and the debt ceiling, which he can refuse to sign except for small increments of increase, could be used as hostages on as frequent a basis as he wants to get whatever he wants out of Congress.
The only way that Congress could fight back would be to remove him from office, but the longer they wait, the more times they give in, the less likely they are to use those weapons (impeachment and/or the 25th). Every time they give in, they normalize the hostage-taking. Like an abused family member, they have to pretend that abuse isn’t actually abuse. By the twentieth time Trump gets his way by hostage-taking, it will no longer be possible to call it that, to rally for impeachment or neuro-psych testing because Trump’s behavior is crazed and sociopathic, because most of these conventional politicians will have spent the first nineteen hostage crises calling the same behavior everything but crazed and sociopathic. If Trump vetoes a funding bill to get his wall this Saturday, they have to impeach or appoint a psychiatric commission per the 25th by Sunday, or they never will.
Trump’s whole political identity, his whole message, is that America has fallen into weakness and chaos because our conventional politicians, of both parties, have fallen into craven, PC-motivated, refusal to dare to use the great power that the US possesses. Fighting and winning a game of legislative chicken is exactly how Trump starts winning, moves on from the feeble and failed attempts we’ve seen the past 100 days to get things done conventionally.
Do not be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the very correct thought that shutting down the govt would be an even worse move in conventional terms. It would be, but we should not assume that Trump is playing the conventional game. Really, the only thing standing in his way, is that he may lack the work ethic and imagination to actualize the ideas embodied in his message. We can hope that’s the case, but hope is not a plan, and following the ideas in his message, that he wins and America wins by bullying less powerful and less unscrupulous actors, actually requires less work and less imagination than the conventional approach. Entropy is not our friend here.