Instead, viewers were treated to something that resembled a cold-open Saturday Night Live skit. With Trump rocking energetically on the edge of his seat, Pelosi flapping her arm while speaking in short bursts, Schumer failing to suppress his mischievous grin, and Pence observing a solemn vow of silence, the body language was entertaining on its own. And then there was the discourse.
When Pelosi mentioned how House Republicans were packing up their offices after their losses, Trump spoke over her. “And we’ve gained in the Senate. Nancy. We’ve gained in the Senate,” he said. “Excuse me. Did we win the Senate? We won the Senate.”
Schumer turned to reporters. “When the president brags that he won North Dakota and Indiana, he’s in real trouble,” he said, leaning back, visibly satisfied with himself.
Trump shrugged, cocking his head sideways and looking confused by the insult. “I did. We did win North Dakota and Indiana.”
Comparing electoral win-loss records was not the ostensible purpose of the meeting, of course. Washington was careening toward another shutdown: Government funding was due to expire on December 21, and with the Democrats soon to assume control of the House, the president saw this as his final chance to win funding for his promised wall on the southern border. He had already signed certain spending bills into law, but others awaited votes in Congress; one was for the Department of Homeland Security, which would spearhead any wall-building project. Trump was demanding $5 billion. Pelosi and Schumer had already made clear that they wouldn’t give a penny more than the $1.3 billion already allocated.
Believing he could rattle his foes under the bright lights, Trump deliberately let the reporters and cameras linger in the room. He pressed his case for border wall funding, claiming that construction was already under way—“A lot of the wall is built”—and accusing Democrats of obstructing Republicans on a project that they had once supported. (It was true that many Democrats had voted for border wall funding in previous Congresses. It was not true that Trump’s wall had progressed as promised; in Texas and California, a few dozen miles of fence were being put up, the same type of barrier built under previous administrations.)
The televised scrum could hardly have been more helpful to the Democrats and more harmful to Trump. For starters, the president rattled off a series of easily disproved untruths—that the wall was already under construction, for instance, and that his administration “caught 10 terrorists over the last very short period of time” at the southern border. (There was zero evidence found to substantiate this; Trump’s own State Department had previously reported that there was “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”6)
On top of that, the president strengthened the internal standing of Pelosi. Dozens of House Democrats had campaigned on a promise not to support her return to the Speakership, and in the weeks following Election Day she had worked tirelessly to extinguish any insurrection in the conference. Younger Democrats whispered doubts about the seventy-eight-year-old Pelosi’s agility and acuity, probing for vulnerabilities they might exploit to force her from power. Yet those doubts were erased as she went toe to toe with Trump on his turf.
Most consequentially, Trump did what every modern politician, from Ted Cruz to Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich to Tip O’Neill, had labored to avoid: He accepted the blame for a government shutdown.
Goaded by Schumer, a fellow tough-talking New Yorker who had studied the art of getting under the president’s skin, Trump said that he was so committed to building the wall that he would shut down the government if his funding failed to materialize. “You know what I’ll say? Yes. If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through the military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government,” Trump said.
“Okay. Fair enough,” Schumer said, looking like the cat that had feasted on a whole flock of canaries. “We disagree. We disagree.”
Trump’s face grew more colorful, his tone sharper, his torso bending so aggressively off his chair that he might have fallen into Schumer’s lap.
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. Because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems—and drugs—pouring into our country. So, I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”
BURSTING THROUGH THE DEEP, OVERBEARING DARKNESS CAME THE faintest hint of light. In the waning days of the 115th Congress, after two years of ruthless polarization and petty score-settling between the two parties, something was happening. It was not a small something; in fact, it was a very big something, something so big, something so important, that it had been unthinkable not long before. Republicans and Democrats were teaming up to pass, on a bipartisan basis, a sweeping, significant piece of legislation. And no one deserved more credit than Trump.
For years, idealists and romantics spanning the partisan spectrum had dared imagine the day in which Congress might finally correct one of its grievous errors: the tough-on-crime legislation of the 1980s and ’90s that had led to an explosion in the U.S. prison population. With the onset of mandatory-minimum sentencing and three-strike laws, America had swept up a generation of nonviolent drug offenders, a wildly disproportionate number of them black, into a penal system making lots of profits and doing little rehabilitating.
Subsequent administrations nibbled around the edges of the problem: Bush signed his prisoner reentry program into law in 2008, and Obama passed a law reducing the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine. Yet these policies did little to address the systemic failures of the criminal justice apparatus: the Third World conditions, the absence of training for societal reintegration, the lack of discretion for judges in sentencing drug-related cases, and the financial incentives to build new prisons rather than keep old inmates from returning.
By 2016, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than two million people were incarcerated in the United States.7 A bipartisan coalition had emerged during the twilight of the Obama years to push a massive criminal justice reform bill, but it was doomed to failure for a simple reason: Conservative Republicans were reluctant to align themselves with Obama on legislation that could be portrayed as soft on crime. With the election of Trump, a self-described “law and order” candidate, the prospects for reviving the effort looked bleak.
Instead, ever so quietly, the coalition expanded during the new president’s first year in office. It was an unlikely crew of conspirators: In the Senate, Democrat Dick Durbin worked alongside Republicans Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee, while on the outside, the Koch brothers teamed with the ACLU and the Center for American Progress. The linchpin: Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who gained a passion for the issue after his father was imprisoned on tax evasion charges.
Kushner didn’t exactly have a track record of accomplishment. He had taken on a laughably heavy portfolio, everything from leading the newly created Office of American Innovation, to spearheading a strategy to combat the opioid epidemic, to brokering a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. (All in a day’s work for a thirty-something with zero government experience.)