Congratulations to Donald Trump.

First for maneuvering into the extremely enviable position of being able to write a check drawn on US taxpayers’ collective account payable to himself for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s quite a feat.

Second for orchestrating and presiding over what, as of mid-week, was the second-longest US government shutdown on record, at 22 days.

The official line is that the two parties are at odds over healthcare. That’s true, but the bigger picture is that the funding lapse is just one more in a series of engineered “emergencies” which the Trump administration’s using to justify what critics describe as a succession of increasingly audacious power grabs. Remember: Autocrats thrive in states of exception. 

For Democrats, there were no good options. Having failed miserably to raise awareness of, and galvanize public opinion against, Trump’s sweeping attempt to consolidate power in the office of an almost monarchical executive, the shutdown at least promised publicity. But it also came with considerable risk including, but not limited to, mass layoffs carried out by Russ Vought, who’s living the Project 2025 dream.

There’s the chart. Just 13 more days and Trump will tie his own record. The 2018/2019 shutdown (over the border wall) lasted 35 days.

Some folks will start missing paychecks soon, and eventually you’d expect this rather glaring manifestation of institutional decay in America to impact the economy, not that we’d know given government data’s suspended.

In my view, most observers under-appreciate (or are in some cases oblivious to) the idea that the Trump administration wants this to go on in perpetuity. Vought will press the layoffs and The White House will move to cancel as much federal funding for Democratic projects as it possibly can, all consistent with the spirit of the Project 2025 program.

Meanwhile, there are still troops in America’s streets, and a lot of voters are blasé about it. That’s how autocracies are built. They normalize the exceptional. By the time people realize the threat’s real — when, to use a hypothetical, you get your nose broken by the butt of rifle when you accidentally bump into an irritable National Guardsman walking down the street — it’s too late.

I have some potentially distressing news for you: Your “no kings” protests are meaningless. He’s got troops — soldiers — patrolling American cities. The fact that you can still dress up like Trump and spend your weekend waving around a sign that says you won’t tolerate a monarch isn’t indicative of anything, and it accomplishes nothing. You’re better off saving that for October 31. At least then you’ll get candy for wandering around in a costume.

Trump’s currently packing his bags for a jaunt to Asia, where he may or may not meet with Xi Jinping. His absence from Washington may well mean that the shutdown has no chance of ending before he gets back. House Republicans seem totally disinterested in resolving the deadlock.

Trump this week accused Democrats of a nefarious scheme. “We will not be extorted [by] this crazy plot of theirs,” he said.

Never forget Nancy Pelosi’s greatest insight into Trump. “Everything he says is a projection of himself,” she famously assessed, in 2019. “He knows the arguments that could be made against him, so he projects [them] onto somebody else.”