As the Trump shutdown drags on with no end in sight, some Republicans are saying publicly that they think House Democrats will cave to Trump’s demands to keep the government closed until he gets funding for the border wall he promised voters Mexico would pay for and that Republicans declined to fund when they controlled Congress.

In a new piece, Washington Post writer Colby Itkowitz praises Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for playing “hardball” with Trump by canceling his State of the Union address until the government reopens.

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“The brilliance in her latest move is that nothing will enrage Trump more than having a nationally televised speech where he gets to talk for 45 minutes about himself and his administration’s accomplishments taken away,” Itkowitz writes.

After eight years of dealing with the Obama administration, Trump and the Republicans seem unprepared for the “emasculation of the president” through Pelosi’s tactics.

“It seems Trump and the White House may have misjudged how Pelosi and the Democrats would respond to their line-in-the-sand refusal to reopen the government without an additional $5.7 billion in border wall funding,” she writes. “Rather than cave to that demand, Pelosi has brought bill after bill to the floor to reopen some or all of the government and put it on the Senate Republicans to act.”

Read the full piece here.