The real loser in all of Saturday’s government shutdown fireworks

There were some clear winners in Saturday’s last minute budget agreement to avoid a shutdown. The Democratic Party won big, Hakeem Jeffries in particular. America won in general. And there were some clear losers. Kevin McCarthy may lose his job. The sedition caucus has certainly lost its influence.

But the biggest loser of all on Saturday was the one person who didn’t get mentioned throughout any of it – and he lost because he was such an afterthought in all of it. That of course is Donald Trump.

Make no mistake, Trump tried to be a participant in the storyline. He tried hard. He very publicly demanded that House Republicans go through with the shutdown. There’s little doubt that Trump was privately coordinating the shutdown attempt with the House Republicans who were pushing it the hardest. And Trump was surely leaning on longtime sidekick Kevin McCarthy behind the scenes as well.

But none of it got Trump anywhere. The shutdown simply didn’t happen, no matter how badly Trump wanted it to happen. The House Republicans in toss-up districts, who are most in danger of losing their seats in 2024, decided they were personally better off not letting a shutdown happen. And that was that. Trump lost.

Trump wanted this one badly, too. He repeatedly said on social media that he wanted a shutdown because it would put a stop to Jack Smith’s criminal cases against him. This is not at all how things work, and the prosecution of Trump would have been unaffected by a shutdown. But Trump is at that point of desperate hopelessness where he’s willing to pin his hopes on anything that comes along, even imaginary solutions. And since he believed a shutdown would magically save him from prison, he did everything he could to make a shutdown happen.

But, as has consistently been the case for the past two and a half years, Donald Trump lost. At this point all he does is lose. He’s losing civil cases, criminal cases. His life now consists of a losing battle to fend off bankruptcy and prison. And now he just found out the hard way that his influence over the Republican Party isn’t nearly what he was counting on. If Trump were calling the shots, there would have been a shutdown. But Trump isn’t calling anything these days. It’s simply over for him.