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26 MICHAEL WOLFF shutting down the government would sweep that approach right off the table. The White House, quite behind Trump’s back, was aggressively work- ing to pass the appropriations bill and avoid a shutdown. The vice presi- dent gave Trump the same assurance he had been given previously when a budget had been passed without full funding for the Wall: Pence said the bill provided a “down payment” for the Wall, a phrase whose debt-finance implications seemed to amply satisfy the president and which he repeated with great enthusiasm. Marc Short, the White House director of legisla- tive affairs, and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Manage- ment and Budget, in a joint appearance in the White House briefing room that Thursday, shifted the debate from the Wall to the military. “This bill will provide the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending since World War II,” said Mulvaney. “It'll be the largest increase for our men and women in uniform in salary in the last ten years.” ob The attempt to distract the Trumpian base with these bromides utterly failed. The hard-core cadre insisted on forcing the issue, and Bannon was delighted to serve as their general. Within minutes of the budget bill’s passage on March 22, Bannon, in the Embassy, began working the phones. Calling Trump's most ardent supporters, his goal was to “light him up” The effect was nearly imme- diate: an unsuspecting Trump started to hear from many of those on his noisy back bench, who were suddenly furious. Bannon understood what moved Trump. Details did not. Facts did not. But a sense that something valuable might be taken from him immediately brought him up on his hind legs. If you confronted him with losing, he would turn on a dime. Indeed, turning on a dime was his only play. “It’s not that he needs to win the week, or day, or even the hour” reflected Bannon. “He needs to win the second. After that, he drifts” For the hard-core Trumpers, it was back to a fundamental through line of Trumpism: you had to constantly remind Trump which side he was on. As Bannon organized a howling protest from the president's base, SIEGE 27 he took stock of the Trump reality: “There simply is not going to be a Wall, ever, if he doesn't have to pay a political price for there not being a Wall” If the Wall was not under way by the midterm elections in Novem- ber, it would show Trump to be false and, worse, weak. The Wall needed to be real. The absence of the Wall in the spending bill was just what it seemed to be: Trump out to lunch. Trump's most effective message, the forward front of the Trump narrative—maximal aggression toward ille- gal immigrants—had been muted. And this had happened without him knowing it. OF The night of the twenty-second, the Fox News lineup—Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity—hammered the message: betrayal. The battle was on. The Republican leadership on the Hill, along with the donor class, stood sober and pragmatic in the face of both political realities and the prospect of unlimited billions in government spending— with, certainly, no illusions that Mexico was going to pay for the Wall. Opposing them were the Fox pundits, righteous and unyielding in their appeal to the true emotion of Trumpism. The personal transformation of Trump over the course of the evening was convulsive. All three Fox pundits delivered a set of electric shocks. each rising in current. Trump had sold out the movement. Or, worse. Trump had been outsmarted and outwitted. Trump, on the phone, roared in pain and fury. He was the victim. He had no one in his corner. He could trust no one. The congressional leadership: against him. The White House itself: against him. Betrayal? Almost everyone in the White House hac betrayed him. The next morning it got worse. Pete Hegseth, the most obsequious o: the Fox Trump lovers, seemed, on Fox & Friends, nearly brought to tear: by Trump's treachery. Then, almost simultaneously with Hegseth’s wailing, Trump abruptly— confoundingly—shifted position and tweeted that he was considering vetoing the appropriations bill. The same bill that, twenty-four hours before, he had embraced. ' HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021137