Michael Cohen - Let The Shutdown Games Begin

There’s a line I used to hear when working for Donald Trump: “The art of the deal is making them suffer until they break.” That’s not negotiating. That’s sadism with a pen and a contract. And what we’re watching in Washington today — the looming government shutdown, the finger-pointing, the chest-thumping — is Trump’s ethos spread across the entire political bloodstream. It’s not about compromise. It’s not about governance. It’s about inflicting enough pain until someone else folds. The problem is, when the government shuts down, it isn’t the politicians who suffer. It’s America.

So here we are again. Deadlock. The White House, led by Trump, is spouting bizarre and incendiary accusations — Democrats supposedly want “transgender operations for everybody” to keep the lights on, while House Democrats, led by Hakeem Jeffries, insist they won’t sign on to any bill that guts health care. A standoff with no give. A staring contest where the people holding power have every incentive not to blink, because to blink is to lose face. Meanwhile, the country prepares to bleed out.

The truth is, Republicans hold both chambers of Congress, but control isn’t the same as power. In the Senate, they still need Democratic votes to cross the 60-vote threshold and fund the government. That’s the paradox of this shutdown: Trump and his allies can pound the table, but without some measure of cooperation, nothing moves. Instead of seeking common ground, the White House prefers chaos, issuing absurd accusations and political smears while the machinery of government grinds closer to collapse.

So the real question is: what breaks the deadlock? What forces resolution when neither side wants to give an inch, when the president himself shrugs and says he doesn’t care who gets hurt so long as he can point a finger and scream, “the radical left did this”?

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/let-the-shutdown-games-begin