One of Donald Trump’s most impressive political gifts is in choosing enemies.

As president, he often manages to select targets for his power grabs or retribution that are hard to defend. Trump’s prosecution of James Comey, who was a hyperpolitical peacock of an FBI director, makes critics of Trump’s heavy hand with the Justice Department say “Even though Comey …”

Or how about trying to shut down Jimmy Kimmel, who can be relied on for partisanship but not laughs? Friends of the First Amendment on the right felt obliged to say that Kimmel deserved to be canceled, but not at the government’s behest.

Who wants to be seen as the apologist for South American drug cartels by saying that the Fourth Fleet can’t be turned into a death squad? Or that Chicago’s crime rate is a problem, but the military shouldn’t be involved? Or that the post-COVID migration surge was overwhelming but that illegal immigrants deserve due process? Or that the mainstream media is deeply flawed, but that wire services shouldn’t be shut out of the White House press pool?

Trump knows what and who his supporters don’t like and knows well how to pick fights in a way that forces a choice between a president who shows a lot of contempt for the Constitution and opponents who Republicans love to hate.

In his first debate as a presidential candidate, way back in the summer of 2015, Trump was asked a very obvious, and as it would turn out, prescient question about lewd and sexist things he had said about women in his long public life. His response: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

Blammo.

In three words, Trump asked Republicans if they would stand with him or with the world-famous generator of GOP outrage, a person whose whole brand had been built around being an obnoxious critic of their party. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true that O’Donnell had been the only victim of his piggish barbs; it mattered that it was funny and divisive.

The ongoing federal government shutdown offers the president a great platform for picking enemies.

“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people,” the president said of a plan to deny furloughed federal workers back pay. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

Of a plan to shut down some agencies entirely, Trump had a similar thought:

“We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs,” he said. “We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.” Like blue state infrastructure projects, for instance.

With the help of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, Trump is offering Republicans a kind of Strangelovian shutdown in which the right people benefit and everyone else gets nuked.

There is the problem of military pay, which becomes a serious matter on Wednesday when troops are next supposed to get their salaries. There’s also the problem of air travel interruptions, which are bad and about to get a lot worse, as Federal Aviation Administration workers go unpaid. Republicans, after all, fly too.

The president has a solution in mind for how to keep programs he and Republicans like, and you won’t be surprised that the one simple trick is … tariffs. The feds are taking in more than $30 billion a month in taxes paid on U.S. imports. It would cover a fraction of the total cost of operating the government, but it would pay for some favored programs and allow the administration to neglect enemy interests.

The problem, of course, is that it isn’t Trump’s money. Without spending authorization from Congress, the Treasury Department can’t appropriate funds. But you can certainly expect that if the shutdown keeps up, Trump will try to go it alone, as he successfully did in his first term by taking money for his border wall from other funds.

That’s the kind of shutdown a lot of Republicans could really get behind: Trump just picks and chooses what and whom to fund and lets the rest of the government wither on the vine. How much of this is a bluff designed to get Senate Democrats to knuckle under and vote to reopen the government and how much of this is wishcasting by MAGA? Whatever the ratio is now, it will trend more toward Republicans saying they actually want the shutdown to continue. The longer the better, they will say.

But if this really becomes policy instead of a bargaining position, there would be big trouble ahead.

One of the things that MAGA likes about the shutdown is that we haven’t yet seen the official September jobs report, which, based on recent trends and downward revisions, was expected to be unhappy. But numbers put together by the Carlyle Group to help investors gauge what’s happening in the economy suggest that September was the worst month for hiring since the pandemic.

A reasonable explanation for the weakening jobs market would be that the same tariffs that would fund the one-branch government of a Rosie O’Donnell-style shutdown have been crushing the manufacturing sector, which just posted its seventh straight monthly contraction. The administration’s solution for the problem so far seems mostly to be having the government take ownership shares in struggling companies and granting them favorable arrangements against competitors.

It’s not surprising then that consumers are feeling sickly about the economy. A........

© The Hill