Inside the talks and phone calls that convinced Trump to go against the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader.

By Jake Sherman & Anna Palmer @ Politico.com, April 6, Adapted from THE HILL TO DIE ON: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America. Copyright © 2019 by Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer.

[....] as Meadows was on the House floor exhorting Republicans to keep a stiff spine, his fears of a GOP fold were coming to fruition on the other side of the Capitol dome. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was preparing a bill to fund all of the government through February 2019. This would be a way to avoid a shutdown, and it had the added benefit of disrupting the early days of Pelosi’s speakership with a wall crisis—a skirmish Republicans thought they could win.

Meadows didn’t like any of this. Why in God’s name would Re­publicans have more leverage once Democrats took back the House? he thought. Start the fight now. After he got off the House floor, he headed to the Capitol Hill Club with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and fellow Freedom Caucus stal­wart Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). They were there to meet Mul­vaney, their old colleague who had recently been named acting White House chief of staff, for a bite to eat. Whether they planned it or not, the private club meeting became the jumpoff point for the longest shutdown in American history [....]