As the ongoing government shutdown drags on, rolling into its 27th day on Thursday, Donald Trump has shown no signs of a willingness to end the lockout that has left 800,000 government workers without pay — and affected another 4.1 million American workers who though in private industry rely on government contracts, according to a National Public Radio report.
In fact, Trump on Wednesday told supporters on a conference call that “We’re going to stay out for a long time, if we have to. We’ll be out for a long time,” according to NBC News . At the same time, Republicans in Congress have shown little sign of breaking with Trump to pass legislation that would reopen the government.
While a recent poll showed that even Trump’s base voters — white voters without college degrees — are beginning to desert him, as the Inquisitr reported, one prominent conservative author and columnist expressed his disgust at the behavior of Trump and his party, comparing the Republicans of “yesteryear” to what Boot calls the “drunken frat boy party” that is today’s GOP, he says.
The days of “responsible” Republican leaders are long gone, Boot wrote in a Wednesday Washington Post column.
“The GOP has metamorphosed from the preternaturally mature Father Knows Best party to the perpetually juvenile Van Wilder party. It wants to live it up, moon the grown-ups and dodge the consequences.”
Boot, who in a column in December of 2017 declared Trump “guilty” of Russia collusion, as the Inquisitr reported, is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of several books, most recently The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right , in which he issues a “warning that the Trump presidency presages America’s decline.”
“The GOP’s proclivity for using government shutdowns to force through its agenda is another example of its drunken frat-boy antics,” Boot wrote in his Post column. “The three longest government shutdowns in U.S. history were all caused by Republican temper tantrums.”
The architect of what until the current shutdown was the longest government closure in history, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, appeared to prove Boot’s thesis correct on Wednesday, when he urged Trump to simply stop even trying to negotiate an end to the shutdown with congressional Democrats, as CNN reported.
Instead, Gingrich suggested that rather than negotiating a compromise to end the shutdown, Trump should “schedule three rallies in three Democratic districts and have people show up — see how Democrats feel about that kind of direct pressure?”
