From changing his positions to undermining his vice president, President Trump has left even his own party baffled as lawmakers search for a way to reopen the government.
WASHINGTON — Officially, Republicans blame Democrats for what on Saturday will be the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history. Privately, many concede, the stalemate over President Trump’s demand for a border wall has been made exponentially worse by White House ineptitude on Capitol Hill, where two years of contradictory statements and actions have built up a profound lack of trust.
Republican lawmakers and aides worry that Mr. Trump has misunderstood Democrats’ incentives to stand firm and that he has deputized the wrong aides to press his case. And they question who — if anyone other than the president — has the authority to resolve the impasse. They describe a dysfunctional dynamic where even senior leaders in Mr. Trump’s own party never know quite what to expect from the president.
“It’s always difficult when the person you’re negotiating with changes their mind — including my wife,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about the consequences of Mr. Trump’s penchant for doing so.
Mr. Cornyn noted that in the days before the shutdown began on Dec. 22, he and every other senator had voted for a stopgap government spending measure that omitted wall funding, believing that the president supported it, only to learn later that Mr. Trump had no intention of doing so. The president’s about-face — and House Republicans’ decision to add $5.7 billion in wall funding to the Senate bill — precipitated the shutdown, which reaches Day 22 on Saturday.
“My understanding was that the president was going to sign that, but apparently he changed his mind,” Mr. Cornyn said.
Such miscues and abrupt changes of course have become a staple of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Congress. The president has now repeatedly undercut Vice President Mike Pence, to whom he has delegated the task of negotiating an end to a seemingly intractable stalemate.
“It’s very difficult to be successful if there’s not predictability, reliability and trust,” said Phil Schiliro, who served as President Barack Obama’s legislative affairs chief in his first term. “For there to be a successful negotiation and for people to move off the position they came in with, members want to know that there’s going to be closure and agreement and cover at the end of the day.”
Mr. Pence denied on Thursday that he had ever told lawmakers that Mr. Trump would sign the bill, pressed personally by the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to keep the government open without funding for the wall.
“I said the president hasn’t made up his mind,” Mr. Pence said.
But that is not how Republicans remembered it.
“He got off to a bad start; he kind of pulled the rug out from under McConnell’s feet there with that one,” said Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida.
