President Trump said “he was alone in the White House with a plan at the ready to reopen the federal government, but close White House advisers and staff said they remained in the dark about how he would end the three-week partial shutdown,” Politico reports.

Said one Republican: “No one knows what he will do, and the president has not decided yet, so it keeps everyone guessing. This could go on another week and he could declare an emergency, or this will go on until February.”

Benjamin Wittes writes that the New York Times had been working on their bombshell story about the FBI investigating President Trump for weeks.

“Observers of the Russia investigation have generally understood Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work as focusing on at least two separate tracks: collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, on the one hand, and potential obstruction of justice by the president, on the other. But what if the obstruction was the collusion—or at least a part of it?”

President Trump unleashed a Twitter tirade in a response to a bombshell story that said the FBI opened an investigation into whether Trump was secretly working for the Russians.

Said Trump: “Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!”

And more: “The FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey’s poor leadership and the way he handled the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department). My firing of James Comey was a great day for America. He was a Crooked Cop.”

Timothy O’Brien: “Trump, in reality, was never a peerless or even a particularly skillful dealmaker, and many of the most significant business transactions he engineered imploded. Instead, he made his way in the world as an indefatigable self-promoter, a marketing confection and a human billboard who frequently licensed his name to buildings and products paid for by others.”

“In Trump’s professional life, his inept dealmaking often came home to roost in unmanageable debts and serial bankruptcies. In his more recent political and presidential life it has revealed itself through bungled, hapless efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act; forge a nuclear agreement with North Korea; wage trade wars with China, Mexico and Canada; retain control of the House of Representatives; turn military and diplomatic strategy on its head; lay siege to sensible immigration policy; and, now, force a government shutdown to secure funding for a prized project — a wall along the U.S.’s southern border.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman slammed Donald Trump in a CNN interview, calling him a “disturbed” president who lies so often that “no one trusts this man.”

Said Friedman: “If we face a crisis with a president who no one believes who’s surrounded by a C-team in a dysfunctional  White House, then God save us.”

He added that the “core problem” is that “we have a president without shame who is backed by a party without spine that is supported by a network called Fox News without integrity. Fasten your seatbelt.”