Tyler Pager

We've seen throughout his presidency.

He likes to sign executive orders.

He doesn't like to defer to other agencies or to Congress.

And he is very focused, as we talked about earlier, on foreign policy.

And so if his ability to institute tariffs is rolled back by the Supreme Court, he's going to be extremely angry.

And it's unclear what his strategy is going to be.

Maybe he'll try to go through the process of getting approval from Congress.

But as Julie said, they're not all so interested in his current posture.

Yeah, look, Michael, what we can point to is what the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said, which was that the reductions were an attempt to, quote, alleviate the pressure on air traffic controllers.

Prior to these cuts, we've seen flight delays, flight cancellations, because air traffic controllers are working without pay.

And in previous shutdowns, we've seen that they just start calling in sick and don't show up to work because they don't want to work without getting paid.

Right.

But also, Michael, to your point, the way that shutdowns often end is through political pain points.

One of the biggest ones is the troops not getting paid.

The president has sort of taken that off the table.

Right, you explained that in our last roundtable, how he worked around that.

Exactly.

So I think there are many people that see this as the administration trying to ratchet up the pressure, particularly on Democrats, who they've been saying need to reopen the government.

But Michael, what's really interesting is that President Trump seems to really only be focused on negotiating with Republicans, not with Democrats.

Jeffries and Schumer, the two Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, requested a meeting with President Trump.