Trump walks back government shutdown posture as he rethinks who will get blamed: report

Former President Donald Trump thought voters would blame President Joe Biden if the GOP forced a government shutdown over immigration. But he's been blindsided, as that doesn't appear to be the case, The Bulwark reported Tuesday.

Trump publicly demanded a shutdown a month ahead of the election if House Republicans failed to pass the SAVE Act, which would impose new citizenship documentation requirements to register to vote.

The law could create obstacles for married women who changed their names, according to the National Organization for Women, which found that about 90 percent of married female voters have a name on their ID that is not the same as the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents, the organization said.

GOP lawmakers failed to pass the bill amid widespread defections from the far right over other issues, and are now trying to cobble together a bipartisan short-term funding bill without any changes to election law.

"Trump had been initially supportive of a shutdown for two major reasons, according to two people who spoke with him: He wanted to spark a discussion on alleged voting by illegal immigrants, and he believed that the Biden administration would pay the political price if a funding bill wasn’t passed," reported Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo, a development that had previously been flagged by Notus.

Trump said, “The president gets blamed for a shutdown,” apparently thinking of the time voters turned against him after he forced a shutdown to try to get funding for border wall construction.

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Now, according to the report, Trump has realized this fight could actually be bad for Republicans after all, and is backing off his all-or-nothing demands.

Part of the change of heart, said the report, came from the fact that "Trump confidants pointed out that the former president was blamed for that shutdown at the time because he was the one who had called for it. Also, they noted to Trump, President Joe Biden is no longer his opponent, and Vice President Harris has been able to escape the gravitational pull of Biden’s bad poll numbers. They impressed on him the idea that Harris and Democrats would benefit from being able to label House Republicans as obstructionists."

Though not currently in any office, Trump has exerted influence on the House GOP caucus from behind the scenes. It was his wrangling that shut down discussions of a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, which he reportedly feared would resolve an issue he wanted to campaign on in the election.