TACH IT UP, TACH IT UP, BUDDY GONNA SHUT YOU DOWN

In botanical terms, a weed is simply a plant that thrives in chaotic conditions – disturbed soil, competition for light and water, that sort of thing.  Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a weed.  He thrives on political chaos, and he always has a plentiful supply because he generates chaos wherever he goes.

That’s something to keep in mind when you’re wondering how long the partial government shutdown will last.  For Trump, the only downside of the shutdown is that, for appearances’ sake, he can’t go to Mar-A-Lago and play golf over the holidays.  As he put it in a Christmas Eve tweet, “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House.”  Has any president sacrificed more?  Cue world’s tiniest violin, as it plays “Cry Me A River.”

But where’s Melania?  Where’s Barron, Tiffany, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Junior?  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.  Much less five of them.  Much less nine ungrateful grandchildren. 

I don’t believe that Donald Trump was literally alone in the White House.  But I do believe it’s possible that the seasonal focus on tidings of comfort and joy might get under the skin of a man who doesn’t have much experience with either.  But I digress.

Trump and his followers don’t care about the 800,000 government employees who aren’t getting paychecks.  They don’t care about the additional millions of American citizens who depend on the services those furloughed employees provide.  For Trump’s people, those aren’t bugs, they’re features.  Their goal is to inflict misery on people who are different from them.

It’s important to realize that Donald Trump has been itching to shut down the government for years.  In 2014, a year before he even announced he was running for president, he told Fox News, “You know what solves it?  When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster.  Then you’ll have a [laughs], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

Trump is doing his best to create precisely those conditions.  His tax cuts for billionaires juiced the stock market for several months, but, as the saying goes, everything Trump touches dies.  He sabotaged multiple sectors of the economy with tariffs and trade wars.  Then he threatened to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, whom he appointed a year ago.  As you might expect, investors took notice of this erratic behavior.  The stock market is down 15% since he dubbed himself “Tariff Man.”  The Obama recovery is now history, and Wall Street is officially in a bear market. 

As if that weren’t enough to destabilize the economy, Trump has upended decades of American foreign policy, siding with dictators while insulting (and in some cases, demonizing) pretty much every traditional ally and neighbor we have.  With the departure of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the last independent voice in the White House will be gone.  Trump’s most influential advisors now include Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the assortment of talking heads on Fox News on any given day.

The Fox shills are just in it for the money.  They make a good living by spouting wingnut propaganda.  The foreign dictators have a vested interest in throwing sand in the gears of American society.  On both ends of the political spectrum (or perhaps simply both sides of the same political coin), there’s also a substantial nihilist element in American politics.  Republican Deplorables join Greens, Libertarians, and even some Bernie Bros in rooting for the country to go to hell in a handbasket.  All of them profess to believe that they’ll be the ones to pick up the pieces.

They can’t all be right.  And since third party progressives have a tendency to succumb to the narcissism of small differences, my guess is that they’ll come out on the short end of the stick.  The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front will spend most of their time and energy fighting each other, and the end result will be the re-election of Donald Trump. 

Be careful what you wish for, folks.  Let’s resist the temptation to further fragment the American body politic, and do our best to keep the United States united.

Or, as Donald Trump put it in his Christmas address to the troops, “It’s a disgrace what’s happening in this country.  But other than that, I wish you a merry Christmas.”