As Donald Trump's government shutdown enters its second month, members of his administration are coming to grips with the fact that his obsession with building a taxpayer-funded border wall is putting the health of the American economy in real jeopardy. It is surely a difficult thing to acknowledge: that one's boss's inability to resist the demands of his most virulently xenophobic base voters now imperils the thing on which their political survival most heavily depends.

In an interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, last seeing comparing hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees to lucky recipients of free vacations, admitted that if the shutdown persists until the end of the quarter, the U.S. economy could see no growth during that period.

"It is true that if we get a typically weak first quarter and then have an extended shutdown, we could end up with a number that's very, very low," he said. Perhaps sensing that this is the sort of revelation that tends to alarm investors, Hassett asserted several times that the economy would make up for all lost growth if and when the government reopens. "Humongous," he said, describing his second-quarter projection if an event occurs that Trump has reportedly threatened to delay for "weeks or months." When pressed by Harlow, however, he acknowledged that the very, very low number in question could indeed be zero.

Meanwhile, the administration's messaging effort continues to be spearheaded by people for whom the prospect of forgoing regular pay is a foreign one. Lara Trump, who by virtue of her marriage to Eric Trump hosts propaganda clips produced for her father-in-law's 2020 re-election campaign, encouraged federal workers to "stay strong" while the president continues chasing a billion-dollar construction project to which most Americans are opposed. "It's going to last as long as it takes for him to get his wall," she said, as hundreds of thousands of Americans try to figure out how to pay their credit card bill next month.