Government shutdown shows Donald Trump isn’t such a great dealmaker after all

DONALD Trump kept repeating the same boast over and over when he ran for president. He talked a big game. But now a crisis has exposed his flaws.

THE US government is set to reopen after days of chaos thanks to an agreement between Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

But Donald Trump’s conspicuous lack of involvement in solving the crisis has raised new questions about his portrayal of himself as an excellent dealmaker.

The government shutdown started on Friday when Congress missed a deadline to reauthorise the federal government’s spending. That led to most “non-essential” services and programs temporarily closing down.

At the heart of the shutdown was a Democrat demand for Congress to protect “Dreamers,” illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, from deportation.

Democrats accused Mr Trump of reneging on an earlier accord to protect Dreamers and demanded he negotiate on immigration issues as part of any agreement to resume government funding.

However Republicans, who have a slim 51-49 Senate majority, said they would not negotiate on immigration until the government was reopened.

And in the end, they won the standoff. Democrats have agreed to a short-term budget deal that will keep the government running until February 8, and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to consider legislation to protect Dreamers.

There is no doubt it’s a victory for Republicans. The question is, can Mr Trump take any credit?

Mr Trump criticised Barack Obama after a US government shutdown in 2013. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

THE DEALMAKER

Mr Trump has written a book on the art of negotiation.

In The Art of the Deal, Mr Trump boasted of his fickleness as a negotiator, describing it as a strategy.

During the 2016 election campaign, he repeatedly boasted about his talent for making good deals, turning it into a key rationale for his candidacy. He touted his experience in the real estate business and said he could transfer the same skills to government, ending the gridlock in Washington DC.

However, he has found political dealmaking to be more challenging than expected.

Mr Trump did enjoy one big success during his first year in power, passing sweeping tax reform. Otherwise, he struggled to get his agenda through Congress, despite his own party controlling both the Senate and the House.

Most notably, Mr Trump failed to implement his core promise to repeal Barack Obama’s healthcare law, Obamacare. Republicans abandoned their efforts to scrap the law after multiple attempts failed, even after Mr Trump personally lobbied members of Congress to vote for his position.

Republican strategist Alex Conant said the reality is that brokering deals in politics is very different to doing it in the business world.

“Negotiating in politics is a lot different than real estate,” he said.

“In Washington, not everybody wants to make a deal. Trump’s initial premise that politicians just needed to be prodded more to make a deal was always flawed.

“Nobody runs for Congress because they want to compromise their principles. They want to advance their agendas.”

There have been four government shutdowns since 1990.

In the last one, in 2013, more than 800,000 government workers were put on temporary leave in a 16-day standoff over funding for President Obama’s health care law, “Obamacare”.

As a private citizen, Mr Trump criticised Mr Obama during that shutdown for failing to “lead” and get everyone in the same room.

Mr Trump, who in July 2016 said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” has asserted that past government shutdowns were the fault of the person in the White House.

THE DEAL BREAKER

Republicans needed to secure 60 votes in the Senate to reopen the government. That meant all 51 of their own members, plus at least nine Democrats.

The Democrats insisted that any deal include protection for the 700,000 young immigrants who may face deportation when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program expires in March.

Republicans wanted to push back any talk about DACA and deal with immigration separately at a later date. Ultimately, their position won out.

But throughout their efforts to reach a deal, they were hampered by the confusion surrounding Mr Trump’s own stance. It remains unclear exactly what Mr Trump wants on the issue of immigration.

“I’m looking for something that President Trump supports. And he’s not yet indicated what measure he’s willing to sign. As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels,” said Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, a member of Mr Trump’s own party.

During the shutdown, amid lawmakers’ desperate efforts to reach a deal, the White House was conspicuously quiet. The president mostly stayed out of the fray, content to leave it to the other politicians.

The dramatic collapse of immigration talks divided Congress. Picture: Alex Wong/AFP

Dougal Robinson, research fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, told news.com.au both parties blamed each other for the shutdown.

“Immigration is the key sticking point, and it’s a highly partisan issue,” he said.

“Bipartisan compromise in Congress is required to reopen the US government.

“President Trump has been absent from the negotiations over the weekend – watching television and tweeting from the White House, rather than meeting with leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress to try to work out a bipartisan deal.”

Mr Robinson highlighted how Mr Trump criticised Mr Obama for his lack of leadership over the 2013 shutdown.

‘HE CAN’T TAKE YES’

Over the weekend, leading Democrat Chuck Schumer said he and Democrats were willing to compromise, but the problem was Mr Trump “can’t take yes for an answer — that’s why we’re here”.

“I’m willing to seal the deal, to sit and work right now with the president or anyone he designates — let’s get it done,” Mr Schumer said.

House speaker Paul Ryan Ryan, on the other hand, insisted the issue didn’t lie with Mr Trump.

“You can’t blame Donald Trump for the Senate Democrats shutting down the government,” he said.

Mr Schumer and his colleagues accused Mr Trump of being an unreliable negotiating partner, saying the two sides came close to a deal on immigration several times, only to have Mr Trump back out under pressure from the anti-immigration conservatives who advise him.

Mr Trump, for his part, said Democrats are “far more concerned with illegal immigrants than they are with our great military or safety at our dangerous southern border.”

‘UNRELIABLE NEGOTIATOR’

Part of the problem, particularly according to the Democrats, was that Mr Trump’s views on immigration remained unclear.

In a publicly broadcast meeting between Democrats and Republicans earlier this month, Mr Trump said any immigration deal would need to be “a bill of love”, but implied he was open to pretty much any solution.

The president indicated he would sign any bill passed by Congress, regardless of what was in it.

“You guys are going to have to come up with a solution, and I’m going to sign that solution,” Mr Trump said.

“My positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with. If they come to me with things I’m not in love with, I’m going to do it, because I respect them.”

However once cameras stopped rolling, the President’s homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen presented a four-page document on the Trump administration’s must haves for any immigration bill including $18 billion for the border wall, the Washington Post reported.

Mr Trump said the document didn’t represent all of his positions and it caught him off guard.

In a scathing assessment, the Post called Mr Trump an “unreliable negotiator who seems to promise one thing only to renege” later on.

“He boasts of being ‘flexible’ and has few core ideological convictions, yet often seems torn between his desire for a bipartisan ‘win’ and the pull of the nationalist populism he ran on,” the Post assessment read.

“In politics, he resembles at times an amateur jazz musician — moody and improvisational, but without the technical chops to hold a piece together.”

Just hours into the shutdown Mr Schumer was also scathing.

“Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O,” he said.

Mr Trump also met with senators Richard Durbin and Lindsey Graham two days into negotiations to avoid the shutdown.

However according to the Washington Post they found “an angry president, surrounded by hawkish immigration opponents and no longer amenable to the deal he’d praised in phone calls just hours earlier.”

TENSIONS RISE

Then Trump reportedly called Mr Schumer, and, after a positive conversation, invited him to a meeting at the White House in a bid to find common ground.

One person familiar with the events said the two men agreed to seek a grand deal in which Democrats would win protections for the Dreamers and Mr Trump would get more money for a border wall and tighter security to stem illegal immigration from Mexico.

However the deal quickly died after Mr Trump reportedly spoke with conservative Republicans, who objected to it.

As the budget crisis hit soon afterwards, Democrats pushed for immigration to be a part of any agreement keeping the government open - and Mr Trump’s confusing stance became an even bigger problem.

Thankfully, it didn’t stop his Congressional colleagues from reaching a deal.