He's 'ripping the nation apart': Trump friend explains -- 'I don't think there's a plan'

President Donald Trump ran on the idea of being an experienced businessman and notorious deal-maker. Sadly, however, the president has been no match for the experts in Washington.

In a Washington Post report, the paper trolled a president who once claimed, "I alone can fix it." It turns out he cannot.

"The government is not simply broken — it is in crisis, and Trump is grappling with the reality that he cannot fix it alone," Post reporters Phil Rucker and Josh Dawsey wrote Sunday.

The government shutdown is now nearing one month and long ago surpassed the record for the longest in history. It's already cost the country billions and might be urging the economy into a recession that experts warn is expected.

In most cases, Trump's deals have been about the abstract: building, buying, deals from cities and cost of labor. Trump's decisions generally only impact himself, his business and those he's doing a "deal" with. Never before have his deals taken nearly one million Americans hostage in the process.

“Even though he thinks he’s doing a great job for his core, it’s ripping the nation apart,” said one Trump friend, anonymously. “I don’t think there is a plan. He’s not listening to anybody because he thinks that if he folds on this he loses whatever constituency he thinks he has.”

Saturday, Trump made a new proposal that sounded remarkably like the old proposal. Democrats said it was a "non-starter." While the House has passed several bills that the Senate could take up, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to do his job until he knows Trump and Democrats agree.

Democrats already think they have the upper hand because Trump said on camera he would accept responsibility for the shutdown and instead of "border security" Trump is demanding money for the wall and only the wall. If the Democrats offered money for border security and excluded the wall, Trump probably wouldn't take the deal

“What really drove him was Art of the Deal, that he could get stuff done in D.C. and deal with the knuckleheads,” said Republican strategist Mike Murphy, a sharp Trump critic. “People saw him as some sort of business wizard. That’s all disintegrating. It’s like McDonald’s not being able to make a hamburger.”

Read their full report at The Washington Post.