SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And we're joined now by NPR senior political contributor Ron Elving. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: What do you believe are the political calculations of the Trump administration when it comes to SNAP benefits?
ELVING: No one wants to be in charge when families are forced to go without food. But here we have the Trump administration going to some lengths to find $5 billion to pay the military, while refusing to take a similar amount from a contingency fund specifically meant for food assistance. They call that a rainy day fund for a hurricane or an earthquake, but two federal judges have now said it sure looks like an emergency to them. So now Trump says maybe his lawyers can find a way to release the money after all. And when you think about it, this comes in the same news cycle with release of photos of new gold fixtures in the White House bathrooms and news stories about a lavish "Great Gatsby" party at Mar-a-Lago last night hosted by the president. Not great optics.
SIMON: The Senate majority leader, John Thune, once more rejected the president's call to eliminate the filibuster. The president sees that as a way of ending the government shutdown on his terms, but his Republican allies in the Senate resist his call. Why is that?
ELVING: The filibuster, that 60-vote requirement in the Senate, empowers the minority party regardless of which party that is. And Republicans have long memories. They know they could be back in the minority again themselves someday, maybe fairly soon. And they can easily imagine Democrats with the Senate majority making major moves, such as expanding the Supreme Court or granting statehood to the District of Columbia - things the filibuster has prevented in the past. Now, presidents, of course, have long chafed at the filibuster, and Trump is no exception. It's a barrier to his program in the present, and that matters more to him than what might happen to the Senate in some future situation years from now.
SIMON: Of course, Ron, President Trump returned from a tour of Asia this week. Would you call the trip a success?
ELVING: It certainly looked like a success - not just the public spectacles, but also the pile of trade deals and other negotiations that seemed to be successfully completed. Now, we've also seen that with Trump and trade, much that seems set can shift. That's part of what he seems to like about tariffs. He can impose them and then change them at will. He's done that many times, and the current Congress has not yet chosen to assert its own role and rein him in. So tariffs become tools for his personal manipulation, which plays to his strengths as a negotiator and as a showman.
All the same, there would seem to be real gains made on this trip in terms of securing strategic materials and also in de-escalating the talk of trade war with China. That's certainly good news for business and worldwide. Trump also worked hard on this trip to burnish his credentials as a peacemaker, witnessing the signing of a deal between Thailand and Cambodia over border disputes and so on. He was plainly displeased, however, that the whole trip got upstaged by the government shutdown at home.
SIMON: Of course, open enrollment begins today on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. It's going to be on the minds of a lot of people this weekend, isn't it?
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving. Always a pleasure to talk to you and particularly in a week like this with so much happening. Thanks very much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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