Amid all the disarray, President Donald Trump is resuming a partisan mantle he views as a unifier for the right: border warrior. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Government Shutdown Trump owns the shutdown. And he’s OK with that. The president spent the weekend digging in on his position, and aides say he accepts a closure that could drag into the new year.

President Donald Trump is now the “proud” owner of a government shutdown — his third. And he doesn’t seem to mind.

The threat of an extended shutdown is far less of a concern to the president than not making good on his central campaign pledge to build a border wall and looking like a fraud, according to White House aides and Trump allies. Trump spent the weekend digging in on his position behind closed doors, meeting with hard-line conservatives and signaling through his top aides that he could stomach a closure that could drag on well into the new year.


Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, set the bar on Sunday.

“I don’t think things are going to move very quickly here for the next couple of days,” he told Chris Wallace in an interview on Fox News.

The holiday shutdown comes amid a series of tumultuous Cabinet shakeups — Trump announced on Sunday that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would depart earlier than expected — a stock market rout and turbulence from the Republican congressional ranks over the president’s decision to pull troops from Syria and scale back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Amid all the disarray, Trump is resuming a partisan mantle he views as a unifier for the right: border warrior.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the House Freedom Caucus chairman, compared Trump’s stand to the Battle of the Alamo, offering that the historic struggle between Texans and victorious Mexicans is remembered “not because they won there, [but] because they fought there.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who lunched with Trump and Meadows on Saturday at the White House, argued that Democrats and their leaders were the reason the country was in for a protracted confrontation.

“Sen. Schumer, we’re not going to abandon the wall,” Graham said later Saturday, referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “We’re going to build a wall, and to all those Americans who want us to abandon the wall and open up the border, that’s what this fight’s about.”

The president’s aides, in private, have half-heartedly tried to pin the blame on Democrats — despite their boss’ saying earlier this month in the Oval Office that he would be proud to shut down the government for border security, suggesting that the American people were with him on the issue.

Trump, who cast the southern border wall in political terms as a “total winner,” even as polls show that majorities of Americans don’t support the structure, is marching out senior administration officials to assert that he’s been “very clear” about his expectations for funding various “physical barriers.” “We are open to a lot of different options along those lines,” one of the officials said.

Mulvaney said on Sunday that the president’s wall demands were “absolutely necessary.”

Republicans are not uniformly falling in line. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee blasted Trump for failing to avoid the partial shutdown, dismissing his hardening negotiating posture on immigration as “a made-up fight so that the president could look like he’s fighting.”

Trump did not arrive voluntarily at his latest choice to pursue the wall at all costs. Last week, he came under withering attacks from conservatives — notably commentators and hosts who appear on Fox News — who urged the president to veto a Senate-approved bill without wall funding that would have averted the shutdown.

Republicans close to the president said he was shocked by the swift reaction, particularly given everything he’d done up to that point, and that he had come to see this hinge moment as his best, and possibly last, chance to extract significant wall funding.

As the shutdown became a reality, some advisers have urged Trump to focus entirely on the border and Democrats’ intransigence, despite their backing similar security funding before he became president. One ally said the goal was to center the clash on who is with Trump and who is against him. As Graham put it, “This is about them hating Trump so much, wanting him to lose, they can’t understand that America needs to win.”

Trump’s reelection campaign has leapt quickly at the chance to capitalize on the stalemate and paint him as an authentic promise-keeper. One Trump campaign appeal to supporters tarred Democrats as insensitive to the safety of Americans. “FIGHT BACK,” it implored. “Donate to become an Official Build the Wall Member.” And other Trump-backed groups are running ads and circulating petitions to Republicans.

For the president, the border wall is about far more than a structure, allies concede. The White House has long seen his “Build the wall” promise as an indicator for how far his early pledges alone could take him with voters he’ll need to secure reelection.

“The wall is important, but it’s more the underlying anti-immigrant message that’s the key,” a former White House official said.

In addition to saying Mexico would pay for the wall — a goal the administration maintains is still viable, albeit most likely retroactively — others of Trump’s big early claims remain unfulfilled and look increasingly doubtful.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump estimated he would complete the entire border wall within two years from the time he started. “We’ll start quickly,” he added. “And it’ll be a real wall.”

While the wall has yet to come to fruition, the president has been filling the void with more words.

Trump repeatedly boasts about how much of the wall has already been built, even though little if any building has happened, let alone during his presidency. To keep up appearances during the midterm elections, aides handed out signs that read “Finish the Wall.”

Well before the recent conservative backlash reared, one threat the president’s team identified on the subject was supporters beginning to doubt his ability to deliver.

Though Trump could continue to point a finger at Congress, which has given him only a fraction of what he wants for border security, another person close to the president noted that the government-funding exercise was one area where he had the ultimate say.

For now, it’s a function of leverage, which the ally acknowledged Democrats have.