President signs the bill to end his own shutdown and announces the country has been extorted.

Wednesday night, after forty-three days of closed federal offices, after eight Democrats came across, after the House sent the bill back, the President sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and signed the legislation that reopened the government. The cameras were there. The pen was new. The script was about extortion.

“The Democrats tried to extort our country,” he said. “We will never give in to extortion.”

Hon. He just gave in to it.

That is what the signature said. The signature said: I am ratifying this thing I am calling extortion. I have signed it. I am affixing my actual name to it. The thing I just signed is the thing the Democrats wanted, with eight of their senators, in the form I am now calling extortion. I have, in this moment, on camera, become the man who funds extortion.

Two weeks before, on his social network, he had said the shutdown was “good for us.” The same week, he said it was “killing the Republican Party.” The same month, he said it was the Democrats’ fault, and also that it was useful, and also that he would not negotiate, and also that he had negotiated.

I have worked the late shift long enough to recognize a man telling himself a different story every fifteen minutes. He is not lying to you. He is, at minimum, lying to himself, and he is telling you in real time which version is winning.

He told the country, in the same Oval Office address, to “not forget what they’ve done to our country” when the midterms come. The midterms are not for a year. The off-year elections were eight days ago. The country, if Tuesday was a fair sample, has already remembered.

You ever notice how the man at the table who keeps yelling “rigged” is also the man who just signed the agreement.

That ought to concern you.