It seems that a part of Donald Trump’s base—the part that writes and otherwise comments on him, anyway—is angry with the President for having reopened the portions of the federal government he had shut down for 35 days after failing to obtain congressional funding for his Big Beautiful Wall. Some of these people saw this act as a retreat, or a surrender, or even a sellout of the 63 million voters who elected him. Ann Coulter actually called him “a wimp,” the biggest since George H.W. Bush. That was silly of her, since it is hard to see what else Trump could have done in the circumstances.

To say so, of course, raises the question whether he should have committed himself to a promise to shut down the government if the requested $5.7 million for the project were not forthcoming, in the first place. Though one can argue cogently either way, the fact remains that the Democrats, starting with Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer and working downward, did nothing to strengthen their bargaining position, or burnish their image even as politicians, by just saying “no” as many times as Nancy Reagan could ever have wished. Indeed, what was being refused here was not only attention to a matter of national security but also a strategy to staunch the flood of drugs across the border by reducing it to a trickle.

It is true that Trump put up the 800,000 DACA beneficiaries...