“This is petty,” the speaker acknowledged. But, he added, “You’ve been on the plane for 25 hours and nobody has talked to you, and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp … You just wonder, Where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?” Gingrich acknowledged that his pique at the seeming slight had prompted him to send Clinton a tougher spending bill. “It’s petty,” he said, “but I think it’s human.”

The next day, the New York Daily News ran that cartoon of Gingrich on the front page, with a giant headline: “Cry Baby.” Some Democratic group or other—just which escapes me now—promptly circulated the pacifier card in a gleeful piling on.

Read: Trump steals a page from Newt Gingrich

Clinton won the political battle over that shutdown, and a subsequent one a few weeks later. In fact, his tough stance in the standoff helped pave his way to reelection in 1996. But Gingrich had his own sort of revenge: The same day that the speaker complained of his ill treatment, Clinton asked an unpaid intern who was filling in on the skeletal White House staff to join him in his private office. Her name was Monica Lewinsky, and the rest, as they say, is history.

However Donald Trump’s standoff with Senate Democrats ends this week, it seems safe enough to say that there will be consequences no one can now foresee. There almost always are.