THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

While the habits of a life time are very difficult to change, even after 7 months in office Cheeto Mussolini clearly has no conception of how to work with Congress. He still believes he is a stupendous business tycoon who commands a nd people obey.

President Trump issued an extraordinary challenge to his own party late Tuesday, threatening to shut down the government in a matter of weeks if Congress did not fund a wall on the southern border that was a signature promise of his campaign for the White House.

Mr. Trump followed up on that threat on Wednesday by going after a key Republican senator on Twitter who has been skeptical of building a border wall between the United States and Mexico. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is also one of two Republican senators up for re-election next year in a swing state, and the president has put his finger on the scale toward a primary challenger, Kelli Ward.

On Tuesday night, he told a rowdy crowd in Phoenix, “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

“We’re going to have our wall,” he added. “The American people voted for immigration control. We’re going to get that wall.”

Tuesday’s admonition sharpened a suggestion that Mr. Trump made early this year, in the wake of a budget agreement he grudgingly accepted even though it omitted money for the wall, that the United States needed “a good ‘shutdown’” this fall to force a partisan confrontation over federal spending. His campaign promise stressed that Mexico would pay for the border barrier, but that part of the promise seems to have dropped away.

The president wants to push through a tax overhaul by year’s end, which would require Republicans to approve a budget to trigger special procedures — known as reconciliation — that would allow the package to pass the Senate with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 required to bring most legislation to an up-or-down vote.

A budget resolution is always difficult, but it will probably become entangled in another divisive issue, the debt ceiling: The Treasury Department has estimated that the government will reach its borrowing limit sometime in October, at which point Congress will have to vote to increase the debt limit to avoid a default.

Most pressing, the government will run out of money on Oct. 1 unless Congress acts to approve new government spending bills. It would probably the first time a government shut down while under complete control of one party. But in that conflict, the president may have handed Senate Democrats the whip. They can now filibuster any spending bill that contains wall funding, forcing Republicans to strip out the money and challenge Mr. Trump to veto it.

Apparently Cheeto thinks that a government shutdown is like one of his bankruptcies where he sticks the tax paying public with the costs as he walks away untouched. And like too many of the uninformed public he thinks that government can be operated like a business. It just ain't so.