CONGRESS/DEMS/GOVERNMENT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE/WALL: “President Donald Trump reversed his position on a possible government shutdown Thursday [12-20-18] amid rising anger from his conservative base on several fronts. As Trump obsessively monitored criticism from the right casting him as an inept negotiator being rolled by Congressional Democrats, he came to second-guess his earlier decision to sign a bill that would keep the government funded through Feb. 8. He has alternately seethed and panicked about the stream of invective he’s hearing from allies on television, lashing out at aides and flailing for a solution, according to three people close to the president — and even doing damage control with an angry Rush Limbaugh…In recent days Trump has endured some of the harshest commentary of his presidency from typically staunch allies, who say that he is capitulating to Democratic opposition. The conservative commentator Ann Coulter said on Wednesday that Trump will have had a ‘joke presidency’ if he doesn’t build his long-promised border wall. Filling in for Fox News’ Sean Hannity that night, the conservative commentator Dan Bongino said of the Trump base: ‘They want their wall and they want it now.’”
–Eliana Johnson and Burgess Everett, “Pressure from base pushed a flustered Trump into shutdown reversal,” Politico, December 20, 2018 5:15 pm