Julie Hirschfeld Davis

And rather than try to engage in any real negotiation with the Democrats, as Tyler said, President Trump's position has been wait him out, try to get him to cave, and in the meantime, put pressure on Republicans, on his own party, to blow up the filibuster rule so that they can just ram through

a spending bill and not worry at all about what the Democrats want.

That is clearly not going to happen.

John Thune, the majority leader, has said many times he does not have the votes to do that.

There are 15 or so Republicans who are dug in against doing so.

Right.

I mean, it's really because of the be careful what you wish for rule of the United States Senate, which is if they do this, then when and if the Democrats win the majority, they would be able to ram through whatever legislation they wanted to get through the Senate without any regard for what the Republicans wanted.

And...

To do it for a three or four or five week temporary government spending bill would be really quite remarkable because this is a Senate precedent that has been around for many, many decades and the votes are just not there to do it.

But it's interesting to hear Trump say that he thinks it's not necessarily Democrats, it's Republicans, it's his own party who have to get off the dime in order to end this thing.

But it's hard to believe that there isn't a parallel effort going on to get Democrats to do what Trump has believed from the very beginning that they would have done weeks ago, which is cave and just finally allow the government to reopen.

I will say that after the results on Tuesday, there was a real notable shift in the sort of body language coming from Democrats.

Before the elections, I think there was a real sense of they felt that they had won the messaging fight here, their message about extending the expiring Obamacare subsidies.

Right.

had resonated, people agreed with them, that was showing in the polls, but also that this was starting to be very painful and they needed to find an off-ramp here that would get some sort of concession that they've been asking for, but also allow the government to reopen pretty quickly.

I think there was a little bit of a pivot, frankly, after the results came in, and particularly after Trump, like you said, Michael, said the next morning

that the elections were lost in part because of the shutdown.

The shutdown was bad for Republicans.

I think that did give Democrats at least a few more days here of feeling like they really needed to put up a fight and try to get the best possible deal they could get in exchange for reopening the government.

I think that the overarching thing that we can take from what Trump said after Tuesday is not that he's changing so much as that he's doubling down.