“Next week is going to have quite high drama. It's going to be action-packed."

While the potential for a government shutdown has been overshadowed by other events—Syria, North Korea, the attempted repeal of Obamacare—the Trump White House is suddenly seized with the issue. “Next week is going to have quite high drama,” a top White House official, who sounded excited by the coming clash, told me. “It’s going to be action-packed. This one is not getting as much attention, but, trust me, it’s going to be the battle of the titans. And the great irony here is that the call for the government shutdown will come on—guess what?—the hundredth day. If you pitched this in a studio, they would say, ‘Get out of here, it’s too ridiculous.’ This is going to be a big one.”…

“There’s a big spread between the bid and the ask here,” the White House official said, noting that Trump wanted thirty billion dollars for defense, several billion for more ice agents and the border wall, as well as eighteen billion dollars in cuts to domestic spending and the ability to withhold federal money from cities that don’t coöperate with immigration officials.

The big priorities for Democrats are the money for those people who need Obamacare subsidies, the protection of domestic spending, and increases for programs for opioid addiction and health care for coal miners, the last two being issues that Trump ostensibly campaigned on. These shouldn’t be a big deal, Democrats say, and they have accused the White House of throwing a grenade into negotiations in order to wrest some sort of political victory in the first hundred days. “For weeks, the House and Senate Democrats and Republicans have been working well together,” a Democratic aide said. “Then, all of a sudden, the White House is looking at next week and they have nothing to show for the first one hundred days, and they either want a health-care bill to pass next week, which seems like a heavy lift, or to get more on immigration from this process. Even Republicans don’t want this fight, and they don’t want a shutdown on Day One Hundred of the Trump Administration.”