congress, the government will either shut down on february 15th again, or i will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the constitution of the united states to address this emergency. paul: let s bring in deputy editor dan henninger and columnist kim straussing. kim, the president within 24 hours moving from no opening of the government unless you fully fund the wall to, well, okay, a down payment on the wall. now no money for the wall and a temporary government opening. what caused him to finally give in? yeah. the pressure just simply hit breaking point. look, paul, you looked out there, voters blamed republicans, blamed him for the shutdown. it was hurting their approval ratings out there in the polls.
government shutdown. paul: right. the question is how is he going to get that back in the public eye. paul: i want to get there. i want to ask you, kim, a a lot of the restrictionists on the shutdown, a lot of people who have been pushing the president to do whatever it takes to get the funding for the border or wall are now blaming him for following their advice. i guess they wanted to see his approval rating fall even lower? is that fair criticism? no, and it s mystifying, paul. look, here s what we just learned from this shutdown, okay? for years now we ve had a number of people on the conservative side say, you know, shutdowns can work if only you are just tough enough, okay? but you go back to 2013 when the republicans shut down the government over obamacare, it didn t work, it wasn t a successful strategy. you still have those people who go, oh, well, if you hold out even longer, it might have. we just had a president hold out
you had it doing damage, according to the white house s own economists, to the economy. you saw the consequences of the shutdown really start to ratchet up, people not showing up for work, airlines being delayed, things not happening. and also you had members of the republican party who had, up to this point, stuck with this president but were beginning to urge him to change course. paul: yeah. that seems like a pretty comprehensive list to me, dan. but the president didn t really go into this with a strategy to persuade nancy pelosi in the first place. all she had to do was nothing, essentially. and she would win, and that s what happened, he couldn t move her politically. yeah. and the question is whether he s going to be able to move her over the next three weeks. i mean, let s go back. the key event here, surely, was nationally televised meeting at the white house between president trump, nancy pelosi
the border, for sure, with these caravans, mothers and children coming up. and the white house has not quite made it clear whether the problem is the frau of tens of the flow of tens of thousands of people or, as the president keeps saying, crime, drugs and homicidal aliens. they just haven t gotten their message clear. the democrats aren t proposing much of anything, and i think at some point the public will begin to regard nancy pelosi as simply obstinate on this issue if the white house found a way to make a better argument for what they re trying to get. otherwise she ll just roll towards that government shutdown which, i think, in three weeks is really unthinkable. the white house can t possibly believe they could survive another government shutdown. paul: i don t think he s going to shut it down again. all right. thank you, dan, thank you, kim. when we come back, former trump adviser roger stone indicted by special courage robert mueller. we ll take a look at the charges agains