Well, he's shut down the federal government over his xenophobic, pointless, surrealistically expensive, ugly, hateful, ineffective border wall. My dad was a government/civil service employee: GS15, I think was what his level was called, which was a mid-level position. He worked as a statistician at the Interstate Commerce Commission. My Mom, before I was born, also worked for the federal government. She was a computer programmer at the Pentagon. Yep, my parents were "the deep state". Mid-level government employees, middle class (remember that?), working, patriotic Americans with two children and a Chevrolet Corvair in the driveway (unsafe at any speed). Once the kids came along, since it was the 1960's, Mom stopped working. She later would say she thinks she would have been happier, had she continued working, but that wasn't really done back then. So, we were a middle class family of four, living on one mid-level government salary. Living comfortably in the suburbs of Washington, DC, on one mid-level government salary. You could do that back then. Back when there truly was a middle class. Now, you would need two, really high salaries, to afford the house in Bethesda, MD, just outside of DC, that they bought for something like 26k.
Our POTUS just ensured that lots of hard-working, patriotic federal government workers, like my parents were, are now furloughed--out of a job and a paycheck for the time being--just before Christmas.
He rose to power due to many cons, help from an enemy foreign power, and appealing to the ugly, xenophobia in a minority of Americans. He lost the popular vote by over 3 million votes, yet very narrowly won the electoral college, so the ugly xenophobia won and now rules the day.
His supporters, his voters, were told by him, very clearly, very repeatedly, very unambiguously, that "Mexico is going to pay for it." Now, of course, most Americans and people listening to this nonsense around the world knew immediately that Mexico was not going to pay for it. But Trump's supporters? They actually believed this. They actually thought Mexico would pay for an incredibly expensive wall between our two countries. Trump lied to them, of course, as he does about everything. Had they known the truth, that really THEY and all Americans, out of our taxes, would pay for it, it may have given them pause, as most Trump supporters hate paying taxes at least as much as they hate everyone who is different from them. But they bought that lie, along with all of Trump's lies.
So now, federal employees, whom Trump and his supporters crazily and dementedly refer to as "the deep state", who go to work every day in service of our country, who have mortgages to pay and children to feed, are out of a paycheck, as this nutjob digs his allegedly bone-spur-laden heels in to get his wall, and to distract his supporters and perhaps himself from the fact that other walls are, in fact, closing in around him.
He'll get a wall. In fact, he'll get four walls, all closing in around him. Come on, Mueller. We are burning daylight.
