REMINDER: When a Democrat is president, and he and Congress can’t agree on a spending bill and the government shuts down, it’s Congress’s fault. When a Republican is president, and he and Congress can’t agree on a spending bill and the government shuts down, it’s the president’s fault. Or so our media and intellectual elites would have us believe.

It’s also true, though, that Trump didn’t help his own p.r. on this one by announcing that he was willing to shut down the government over the border wall, instead of playing it like Obama and Clinton and insisting that Congress was shutting down the government by not acceding to their budgetary demands.

UPDATE: RELATED: Josh Kraushaar: Why Trump is Losing the Shutdown Fight. The shutdown appeals to Trump’s base, but Trump’s base of 40-45% of the voting public won’t be enough to win reelection, unless the Democrats are dumb enough to nominate someone as unpopular as Hillary Clinton, leading even a significant cohort of Trump-haters to vote for him as the lesser evil.