Negotiation in politics is a fine art. What the public witnessed between President Trump, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was the political equivalent of the food fight from “Animal House.”

Trump presented himself to the public as part of his campaign as a master negotiator, one who mocked his Republican opponents in the primary as a bunch of amateurs, who could get Democrats and Republicans to work out “the best deals.” Since his election, however, he’s had to rely entirely on having a GOP majority to get anything done.

If this meeting with Pelosi and Schumer was any indication, 2019 will not go well.

Say what you want about their politics, Pelosi and Schumer have been in this game a long time and they bring some shrewdness to the table. Trump brings bluster and bravado that he mistakes for political savvy. At the end of that meeting on Tuesday, both Schumer and Pelosi looked like cats who ate the canary. They walked away with the president boasting he’d shut down the government if he didn’t get the $5 billion in border wall funding he wants. It was a remarkable scene and that noise you may have heard was the collective groan of Republicans in Congress.

Naturally, Trump supporters were thrilled and think that meeting will work out well for the president. On social media, there was talk of how people hate backroom deals and this kind of public negotiation is what they want to see.

That’s hogwash. Trump loves the spectacle and the press attention. Trump adheres to Madonna’s adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and as long as the president is the focus of attention, he’s happy — even if it means getting nothing done.

It’s debatable what people think of backroom deals, but we do know a majority do not like it when the government shuts down. People can debate the impact of a shutdown all they want but from a political standpoint, it doesn’t matter for Republicans or Democrats. Earlier this year, for perhaps the first time, Democrats felt the impact of shouldering the blame for a short three-day shutdown.

This time, thanks to Trump’s bluster, Republicans will be on the hook.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., understands the game and knows a shutdown will not work out well for Republicans. Following the White House meeting, he said, “One thing I think is pretty clear no matter who precipitates the government shutdown is, the American people don’t like it.”

Putting aside for a moment that Trump promised for well more than a year that he’d send Mexico an invoice for the border wall, the master negotiator backed himself into a corner with his embrace of a shutdown. Will his base like it? Of course. But even among his base, Trump doesn’t have much wiggle room. Trump’s job approval numbers hover around 40 percent, and the only thing keeping those numbers from sinking further is strong GDP growth and low unemployment.

The possible shutdown is a mess that didn’t have to happen. Trump played a strong hand in not extending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, using it as leverage against Democrats to get more funding for border security. The reason it didn’t happen had nothing to do with machinations by Pelosi or Schumer. Rather, it was Trump’s position on what he’d support or wouldn’t support that constantly changed. Instead of listening to his advisers and hammering out a deal, he’d alter his demands based on what he saw most recently on Fox News.

Trump is on dangerous ground. The year is coming to a close. If the government shuts down, Trump will have to negotiate its reopening with House Speaker Pelosi, not House Minority Leader Pelosi. In that scenario, Trump may not get any money for his border wall.

Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News. He is also a contributor to National Review.

President Trump needs to do a prime time Oval Office address about immigration, the current crisis on the border, and why the country needs bold action from Congress and the executive branch.

Between the migrant caravan and the president’s Tuesday debate with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., immigration has become the most critical issue to a plurality of Americans, according to a Gallup poll. With just three weeks before the new Congress begins, Trump needs to score whatever legislative victories he can before Democrats take over the House.

To help, Trump should go on prime time network TV to tell the country why he needs Congress to fund a border wall, reform asylum laws, and pass E-Verify.

The border wall is Trump’s most important issue not only because it secures the southern border, but also because it was his most significant campaign promise during the 2016 election. So far, Congress has just passed funding on replacement fencing and not the actual construction of a wall. Congress could have made Mexico pay for the wall had House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., attempted to tax remittances and withhold foreign aid, but that’s water under the bridge at this point.

Trump needs to speak soberly to the public and explain why it’s necessary for Congress to fund the wall. He should say how monthly border apprehensions are at the highest they’ve been in years. Migrants coming in from the South are unvetted. There have been cases of migrants attempting to come to the U.S. with infectious diseases and criminal pasts. He should also reference Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan who told the Senate on Tuesday that a border wall would be an “important tool” for stopping illegal immigration.

He should highlight the success of other border barriers in America as well as foreign countries like Hungary and Israel, where there were declines in illegal crossings after they built a border wall. Trump needs to make a simple argument that walls have worked in the past and will work again to stem the crisis on the border.

Congress also needs to close the asylum loopholes which allow migrants to claim “credible fear” and allow a limited holding time for people who come to the ports of entry with children. This asylum system may have been created with the best intentions, but it has caused a massive humanitarian crisis.

Human smugglers, coyotes, and cartels prey on desperately poor Central Americans promising them easy access to a better life in the U.S. for thousands of dollars. It has become a multibillion dollar industry that lawyers help facilitate when they coach asylum seekers on what to say to law enforcement at the border, most of whom do not have credible claims to asylum.

This has to stop, not only for the sake of our sovereignty but also because it enriches human smugglers and has caused the death or disappearance of nearly 4,000 migrants over the last four years.

Enacting E-Verify would round out the essential enforcement measures Trump needs from Congress. It forces employers to check the legal status of anyone applying for a job and is overwhelmingly popular, supported by 79 percent of the country according to an ABC/Washington Post poll. Enacting E-Verify nationwide would protect low-skilled American workers who see their wages undercut by illegal aliens. Trump could even highlight a recent story from The Chicago Sun-Times about a bakery who was forced to fire unlawful aliens and hire African Americans after ICE raided the factory. Wages rose from $10 to $14 an hour for the African Americans who had been economically displaced by foreign nationals.

Finally, Trump needs to make absolutely clear that he will not sign a spending bill that doesn’t fulfill these legislative priorities. Furthermore, he must say he will use the full power of the executive branch to implement his immigration agenda. The Supreme Court ruled in Hawaii v. Trump that the president has broad statutory authority to make natural security judgments when it came to immigration. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president authority to “deny entry to any alien or class of aliens” whenever he “finds” that those class of aliens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Using that executive authority, Trump should start throwing out executive orders on everything regarding immigration from the citizenship question for anchor babies to withholding visas to broad classes of foreign nationals. He should announce that he’s authorizing the State Department to stop the visa approval process and order the military to build tent cities and barriers on the border.

Hardball actions will add pressure not only to Democrats but also business-first Republicans who want cheap labor.

Immigration is Trump’s winning issue. It is the reason why he’s president. If Americans didn’t want to protect the southern border and further immigration restrictions, then Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton would be in the Oval Office right now. Trump needs to use the power of his office and speak directly to the public about why it’s so important in a national address, not just in a tweet.

Ryan Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer based in New York.

Buried in the Justice Department’s sentencing announcement of President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen is a brief aside that may threaten Trump’s legal defense if he gets charged with violating campaign finance laws.

American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer that enabled Cohen’s payouts to former Trump flings Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, asserted that “its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

The three-year sentence issued to Cohen for violating campaign finance laws, income tax evasion, and lying to secure a loan indicates that prosecutors likely considered Cohen’s intentions as illicit. If Trump did in fact direct Cohen to broker the deals with Daniels and McDougal, today seriously hampered his best possible criminal defense: the John Edwards precedent.

In 2011, Edwards faced similar charges for payments issued to his mistress by private donors during his failed presidential bid. He was acquitted on the basis that the payments were meant to conceal the affair from his wife for personal and reputational reasons, not from the public for political reasons. What did Cohen in — or at least, what led him to plead guilty rather than mount the same defense as Edwards — were AMI’s claims that the Daniels and McDougal deals were intended to influence the election. This might hinder Trump’s ability to make the same argument.

For his part, the president tweeted about the outcome of the Edwards case in 2012, demonstrating that if he did direct the payments, he had mens rea in intentionally directing his personal attorney to violate federal law. Again, it is still unclear how much Trump knew and when. But AMI CEO and Chairman David Pecker met with Cohen and “at least one other member of the campaign” in 2015 specifically to discuss “assisting the campaign in identifying [negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women] so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

Campaign finance laws as a whole are generally dumb, ineffectual, and easy to violate. If Trump did in fact direct Cohen to violate them, it’s likely not an impeachable offense, nor is it remotely comparable to the Democrats’ initial charge that he colluded with a foreign dictatorship to rig U.S. elections. But if Trump did direct Cohen to broker the payments to Daniels and McDougal, there’s one more piece of evidence now suggesting that he might have done so with criminal intent.

Negotiation in politics is a fine art. What the public witnessed between President Trump, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was the political equivalent of the food fight from “Animal House.”

Trump presented himself to the public as part of his campaign as a master negotiator, one who mocked his Republican opponents in the primary as a bunch of amateurs, who could get Democrats and Republicans to work out “the best deals.” Since his election, however, he’s had to rely entirely on having a GOP majority to get anything done.

If this meeting with Pelosi and Schumer was any indication, 2019 will not go well.

Say what you want about their politics, Pelosi and Schumer have been in this game a long time and they bring some shrewdness to the table. Trump brings bluster and bravado that he mistakes for political savvy. At the end of that meeting on Tuesday, both Schumer and Pelosi looked like cats who ate the canary. They walked away with the president boasting he’d shut down the government if he didn’t get the $5 billion in border wall funding he wants. It was a remarkable scene and that noise you may have heard was the collective groan of Republicans in Congress.

Naturally, Trump supporters were thrilled and think that meeting will work out well for the president. On social media, there was talk of how people hate backroom deals and this kind of public negotiation is what they want to see.

That’s hogwash. Trump loves the spectacle and the press attention. Trump adheres to Madonna’s adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and as long as the president is the focus of attention, he’s happy — even if it means getting nothing done.

It’s debatable what people think of backroom deals, but we do know a majority do not like it when the government shuts down. People can debate the impact of a shutdown all they want but from a political standpoint, it doesn’t matter for Republicans or Democrats. Earlier this year, for perhaps the first time, Democrats felt the impact of shouldering the blame for a short three-day shutdown.

This time, thanks to Trump’s bluster, Republicans will be on the hook.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., understands the game and knows a shutdown will not work out well for Republicans. Following the White House meeting, he said, “One thing I think is pretty clear no matter who precipitates the government shutdown is, the American people don’t like it.”

Putting aside for a moment that Trump promised for well more than a year that he’d send Mexico an invoice for the border wall, the master negotiator backed himself into a corner with his embrace of a shutdown. Will his base like it? Of course. But even among his base, Trump doesn’t have much wiggle room. Trump’s job approval numbers hover around 40 percent, and the only thing keeping those numbers from sinking further is strong GDP growth and low unemployment.

The possible shutdown is a mess that didn’t have to happen. Trump played a strong hand in not extending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, using it as leverage against Democrats to get more funding for border security. The reason it didn’t happen had nothing to do with machinations by Pelosi or Schumer. Rather, it was Trump’s position on what he’d support or wouldn’t support that constantly changed. Instead of listening to his advisers and hammering out a deal, he’d alter his demands based on what he saw most recently on Fox News.

Trump is on dangerous ground. The year is coming to a close. If the government shuts down, Trump will have to negotiate its reopening with House Speaker Pelosi, not House Minority Leader Pelosi. In that scenario, Trump may not get any money for his border wall.

Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News. He is also a contributor to National Review.