Ever since Newt Gingrich brought the federal government to a halt for three weeks in 1995, “birthing a new era of American gridlock,” as NPR later put it, the shutdown has been one of the capital’s recurring set pieces. Republicans, as the official anti-government party going back to the Reagan era, have usually been blamed. Maybe that’s why Democrats are charging ahead this time. Party leaders on Capitol Hill are calling the partial closure of the government that began at midnight on Wednesday “the Trump shutdown” and claiming that they have no choice but to stand up to an “erratic and unhinged” President in order to protect health-care subsidies that are about to expire for millions of Americans. With Republicans in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress, initial polls suggest that the public is inclined to pin responsibility on the G.O.P. once again.

To which I’d suggest: Be careful what you wish for. What looks like good politics might also prove to be another step in the undoing of the Constitution’s checks and balances.

During Donald Trump’s first term, the President’s demand that Congress fund his proposed wall on the Mexican border led to the longest shutdown in history—thirty-five days, from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019. In the end, Trump caved, agreeing to reopen the government even without the nearly six billion dollars in border-wall funding that he had demanded.

This capitulation was initially portrayed as a triumph for the new Democratic majority under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a stinging defeat for Trump, with headlines such as “Trump Relents on Wall” (Politico), “Trump Concedes” (CNN), and “Trump Is Down, but Not Out” (New York Post)—but it was not. It was, in fact, a moment of revelation in which he realized that he could do just about anything he wanted. In the end, Trump got his border-wall money. He simply went ahead and took it. The history of the Presidency may never be the same.

With the encouragement of the same radical advisers, such as Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, who are at the center of the action today, Trump declared a national emergency at the border, thus creating a pretext for grabbing the funds that he wanted from the military construction budget and other programs. Even some Republicans called this a blatant abuse of power, but, when Democrats and a number of institutionalist holdouts in the G.O.P. joined together to pass a bill meant to bar Trump from seizing the money without congressional authorization, Trump successfully vetoed it. Instead of checking Trump’s power play, Congress proved to be incapable of stopping it.

At least in Trump 1.0, the emergency decree was a one-off response to a specific funding fight with Congress. In his second term, Trump has learned to wield the emergency pen as if it is a magic wand granting him unlimited powers. It’s his template, his new default setting. And the Republican-led Congress has stood by and let it happen. Since returning to the White House in January, he’s declared no fewer than ten emergencies, related to the southern border (again), domestic energy, international trade, illegal drugs, and crime in Washington, D.C. “If I have a national emergency, I can keep the troops there as long as I want,” he said in September, referring to the National Guard troops he ordered into the streets of the capital. Lawsuits are pending on this and many of Trump’s other sweeping assertions of executive authority. But unless the Supreme Court acts decisively to stop him—increasingly a dubious proposition—Trump will continue to use such pretexts to take dramatic actions that our narrowly divided national legislature would almost certainly never approve, such as imposing sweeping tariffs on America’s largest trading partners, militarizing the southern border, and even declaring a “national emergency” with regards to Brazil because he did not like the prosecution of its Trump-aligned former President, Jair Bolsonaro.

The Trump 1.0 shutdown, in other words, was the precursor event for the Trump 2.0 power grab. So no wonder that Trump is going big with this shutdown: as far as he’s concerned, there’s only upside. Who knows what additional authority he’ll have seized from Congress by the time it’s over?

It did not take long for Trump’s maximalist plans to become evident. On Wednesday, hours after the shutdown began, Vought announced that he would use it as the rationale for shutting off billions of dollars in funding for federally approved projects in an array of Democratic-majority states. In New York, home to both the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, Vought targeted a roughly eighteen-billion-dollar plan for infrastructure work, including the long-promised Hudson River rail-tunnel project. (His stated reason was that the project was compromised by “unconstitutional D.E.I. principles,” leading to a uniquely Trump-era question: Is there such a thing as a woke tunnel?) Later on Wednesday, Vought broadened the attack, saying that he would cancel another nearly eight billion dollars, affecting a dozen more Democratic states, in unspecified cuts to climate projects, or, as he put it in a social-media post, “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill warned their Democratic counterparts that all this and more would rain down on them and their constituents unless they folded. Vought had, after all, signalled as much in a memo last month directing federal agencies to prepare for widespread layoffs in the event of a shutdown. “President Trump is going to use that as an opportunity not to tell people you’re furloughed for a few days, but instead to send pink slips and to get rid of left-wing bureaucrats who are imposing left-wing priorities that are contrary to President Trump’s priorities,” Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, said in a Fox Business interview with Trump’s first-term economic adviser Larry Kudlow. Cruz, something of a shutdown expert since he personally drove one in 2013 as part of a failed effort to undercut Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, added, “I think that is fantastic.”