So now, as the shutdown enters its second month, the president owns that federal employees are waiting in food lines like victims of the Great Depression. He owns growing concerns expressed by air traffic controllers about the safety of air travel. He owns the FBI Agents Association’s warning that the shutdown is impeding investigations into crime and terrorism — including probes of the MS-13 gang whose threat Trump has cited as a justification for his border wall. He owns the State Department canceling a conference on — get this — border security. He owns Agriculture Department meat inspectors and Transportation Security Administration officers calling in sick. He owns the damage to the economy, which his own economist admits could result in zero growth in the first quarter.

Trump’s retinue of Marie Antoinettes may not feel the pain, with daughter-in-law Lara Trump counseling federal workers to endure “a little bit of pain” and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (reported net worth: $2.9 billion) professing himself baffled as to why workers without paychecks might need to go to food banks. But the rest of America rightly sees this as a severe crisis and it knows who to blame: the president who foolishly accepted the responsibility before launching on a catastrophic course of action with no plan and no exit strategy.

According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 54 percent of voters blame the president and Republicans for the shutdown, while only 35 percent blame Democrats. A CBS News poll shows Trump down to 36 percent approval and, in an Associated Press poll, down to 34 percent — the same level that President Richard M. Nixon hit approximately a year before his resignation. Trump is even losing his base, with his support in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll down 13 percentage points among white evangelicals and 10 percentage points among Republicans.

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Trump knows he is trapped on a tiny atoll that is sinking into the sea but, with water lapping around his ankles, he does not see any rescue vessel in sight. (Maybe the Coast Guard cutters are in port because of the shutdown?) The president cannot give up on his border-wall fantasy without looking weak and running the risk of losing his most fervent supporters (read: Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh). But if he does not give up on his wall, and the shutdown continues, he will alienate the rest of the electorate — including independents, whose support he needs to win another term and thus avoid indictment for another four years.

Trump has toyed with declaring a “state of emergency” to build the wall (and may still do so), but many Republicans were not willing to go along with such a blatant assault on the separation of powers. He then offered Democrats a pathetic deal — pay for the wall in return for three years of protection for the “dreamers” — but, with many dreamers already protected from deportation by court order, Democrats saw no reason to accede.

The president’s supporters imagine he is a manly man and a master negotiator (shirt seen at Trump rally: “Finally someone with balls”), but he has been outmaneuvered and outmuscled at every turn by a 78-year-old grandmother from San Francisco. The president conceded a humiliating defeat on Wednesday when he had to give up on his threats of marching into the House chamber, like Oliver Cromwell before the Long Parliament, to deliver the State of the Union address uninvited. Trump has been so flummoxed by Pelosi, he can’t even come up with a hateful nickname for her — he calls her “Nancy.” A nation that sees political inexperience as a virtue must be flabbergasted to discover that someone with 32 years in elected office is better at politics than a newcomer who has been there for two years. As promised, Trump is running the government like a business. But it’s not Amazon or Apple. It’s the (now bankrupt) Trump Airlines or the Trump casinos.

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So how do we get out of this endless impasse? It’s pointless to negotiate with a president who changes his mind by the tweet, cannot retain basic information and caters exclusively to his base. It’s time for congressional Republicans — that means you, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — to stop allowing themselves to be held hostage by a president who appears hellbent on costing them even more seats in 2020 than he did in 2018. Cut a deal to reopen the government, increase funding for border security but not a wall, and leave Trump to rage in impotent fury to his friends at Fox News. Trump can retaliate against individual Republicans who cross him; he can’t retaliate against the entire Republican Party, at least not without committing political seppuku.