Tyler Pager

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.

But the president is really just calling on Republicans to...

to abolish the filibuster as a path forward.

I'll defer to Julie on all matters of the filibuster, but really, he wants to see the shutdown end by Republicans blowing up Senate rules, not really bringing the Democrats to the table and figuring out how to get compromise.

Michael, it's really interesting.

I think back to this moment on the campaign where Trump had a campaign event in New Jersey where his advisors wanted him to focus on inflation.

And what they did was they set up this table of all these different grocery items for him to highlight how prices have rose under the Biden administration.

But privately, Trump didn't want to talk about that.

He thought it was boring.

His aides were like, please just talk about the economy briefly, and then you can go talk about whatever you want.

So he goes out to this table with all these groceries and says, you know, my advisors want me to talk about this, but I'm not all that interested in this.

But they say I need to do it.