There are ways of ending things, and ways of ending things.
But we have never seen a way of ending things that was as unpresidential as the petulant way President Donald Trump suddenly broke off his broken-government negotiations with congressional Democrats and stormed out of Wednesday's White House summit � just because Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave him an answer he didn't like (but surely expected!).
Answering Trump's question, Pelosi said even if he ended his government shutdown, she wouldn't promise to give him all the money he wants for a border wall that experts say isn't essential. Trump called negotiating with Pelosi "a waste of time" � and shutdown his summit to end the shutdown.
But Washington forgets: We once witnessed a stunningly similar sudden collapse of another determined Republican president's budget summit with another determined Democratic House speaker. Yet it was done without the name-calling nastiness that has made the Trump presidency what it is today.
The details of what happened when President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill met on Wednesday, April 28, 1982, in the Capitol's ornate President's Room, remain vivid in my mind because, as a national correspondent of The Washington Post, I spent the rest of that week reporting on how it all broke down.
Let's start at the end, because that's where the most fun stuff happened.
The budget battle had come down to one impasse that seemed irreconcilable � the regularly scheduled cost-of-living-adjustment increase in Americans' Social Security checks, which speakers of gov-speak always shorthand as the "COLA." Reagan was pushing for a lowering of the COLA; O'Neill was insisting there would be no messing with the COLA in that election year.
During a recess, O'Neill's young press secretary, Chris Matthews told the Democrats that, back at the White House, Reagan aides had told reporters that Democrats surfaced a COLA modification. Democrats were enraged and Reagan brought in his communications director, David Gergen, who said there'd been no such briefing. (But, as a savvy presidential adviser, Gergen knew that didn't mean someone hadn't whispered something to someone.)
When a Democrat then made a budget proposal that Reagan considered absolutely unacceptable, the Great Communicator rejected it by evoking phraseology that wasn't quite as eloquent as Reagan's "shining city on a hill." As I quoted it in Sunday's Post, Reagan said: "Well, you may make me crap a pineapple, but you won't make me crap a cactus."
Democrats grasped the subtlety. There would be no agreement. But none of the adults in the room wanted to be reported in the BREAKING NEWS as the first who left the table � and killed the summit. So they all sat in adult silence.
"Mr. President," said Speaker O'Neill. "We're waiting for you to get up."
More silence. Finally, Reagan's chief of staff, James Baker, who would have a future in diplomacy, said: "Let's all get up at the same time." And lo, they did. Political peace continued. The Gipper and Tip golfed together. Governance kept happening.
Fast-forward: Today's impasse is built around the fact that nothing much has changed at the U.S.-Mexico border since Trump began running for president by announcing we would build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it.
But just days ago, I was stunned to hear Pelosi declare that a border wall is "immoral." That's political message foolishness. Democrats need to be emphasizing that U.S. homeland and border security will always be prime priorities � that's why they won't waste money on fake crisis jingo and gimmicks that experts say aren't needed.
But while there is no crisis relating to the border or a wall, today Trump indeed faces a crisis: Special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russia's efforts to cyber-sabotage the 2016 election and Trump Team contacts and money deals with Russians is almost done.
And that brings me to the one final point that is unprovable, yet I'm convinced it is very real. I believe Trump forced this government shutdown to divert our attention from Mueller's pending report. If there were no Mueller probe, Trump wouldn't have shutdown government.
Trump's shutdown has made hostages of the families of hundreds of thousands of patriotic U.S. government workers and contractors. His shutdown threatened to deprive those families of paychecks needed to pay rent, mortgages and all that's required to raise their families.
EPILOGUE: The struggle of living paycheck to paycheck is something some born-rich presidents apparently cannot imagine. But others always could, including George W. Bush. One day during the 2000 New Hampshire primary, Bush memorably conveyed his compassionate conservatism by asking an audience to imagine being a single mother, struggling just to "put food on your families." (You can look it up.)
