It’s no wonder that President Donald Trump, the self-described master of the art of the deal, is feeling sore. First, he shut down the US government for an unprecedented 35 days to bully congress into agreeing to his ludicrous demand for a $5.7bn border wall. Now, he has instead been forced to agree on a spending bill that allocates less money to his private obsession than he would have secured had he not held the whole country hostage, and used the livelihoods of 800,000 federal government workers, who did not receive pay during the shutdown, as a political pawn.
After several days seemingly spent sulking, Trump on Thursday agreed to sign a spending package that would allocate $1.4bn to building an extra 55 miles of steel barrier along the US-Mexico border. (As the Associated Press dryly observed, in almost 2,000 pages of legislation and accompanying notes, the word “wall” isn’t mentioned once.) The bill also caps the number of detention centre beds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can maintain – though depressingly, it allows for an increase in the number of immigration detentions compared to last year. Had he agreed to sign a spending bill in December, and averted the government shutdown, he would have received $1.6bn for the wall.
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