Robert Reich Predicts What’ll Finally Force Donald Trump To ‘Cave’ On Shutdown

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich thinks one particular pressure will eventually force President Donald Trump and Republicans to “cave” and end the current government shutdown.

“My prediction: This shutdown will end sooner than the last one. Air traffic controllers will ensure it does,” the former Bill Clinton Cabinet secretary wrote in his latest newsletter email.

Read Reich’s full essay on Substack.

“Within the next few weeks, a few will call in sick. Then the flight delays will cascade,” he envisioned. “At that point, pressure will suddenly mount on the White House and Republicans in Congress to end it.”

Republicans “own” the current shutdown because they control the presidency, the House, the Senate and “effectively, the Supreme Court,” Reich said.

“They and Trump will be blamed for the shutdown, and they’ll have to get the nation out of it — even at the cost of giving in to congressional Democrats,” he concluded.

In the 2019 shutdown, during Trump’s first term, a national union representing pilots warned in a letter to the president that the shutdown threatened the “safety and security of airspace.”

Last month, Reich suggested the tide of public opinion may be finally turning against Trump after “one wild week” in which he “revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him” amid the Jimmy Kimmel suspension controversy.