Well, Trump caved yesterday, with $0 for the wall. It's not over yet but I find it hard to believe that he can get anything now that his bluff's been called.
This is just a CR, so a full budget will be coming soon. I still think he might get the $1.6 billion (and call it a massive victory). The $5.7 billion is very unlikely now, since the inertia is now strongly against him, and he's demonstrated a lack of willingness to follow through. I predict that there will not be another shutdown in 3 weeks.
I'm disappointed it ended so soon. Things were just starting to heat up.
I'm constantly shocked and how incompetent Trump's advisors must be. He could have won this if he'd been willing to endure major disasters and widespread outcry, but clearly he wasn't anywhere near so willing, since he broke at almost the first sign of trouble. So it's now clear that he had no strategy for winning when he went into this. I get the sense that he's surrounded by the sort of energetic but unrealistic ideologues you see on eg. /r/The_Donald, plus a handful of establishment neocons who he only sometimes listens to. I kind of like Trump - his policy instincts are better than most politicians, and he's unusually willing to buck the establishment -, so it's disappointing that his administration is such a mess.
If I were him and had similar values as he does, I'd fire basically my whole staff, replace them with people from the Heritage Foundation, tell them to figure out a way to get a wall built and make me look good, and then let them do 99% of the work from there. Then he'd have a functioning administration and he'd probably end up getting his wall, since he'd have actually-competent people working on it. Right now he's clearly in way over his head and surrounded by people who are either trying to undermine him or loyal-but-incompetent.
The reason he has emergency authority to build a wall is because it falls quite clearly under national security grounds, and most importantly defense of the nations sovereign borders.
This is the kind of overly-optimistic advice he should not be believing...
If he just had to move military to the border or something like that, he might get away with it. But in order to build a wall, he has to confiscate private property, and that's never going to stand. Every property-owner is going to sue Trump, and if even one of those many courts orders that construction be stopped, it's stopped. Furthermore, a president lost a
very similar case in the Supreme Court previously: In order to fight a war more effectively, a president tried to confiscate steel factories, but was prevented.
So if he tries doing it via national emergency, the courts will stop him near-immediately, it'll be stuck in legal proceedings for years, and at the end he'd probably still lose. Though even if he knows this, he might still try it so that he can say "well, I tried everything I can to build the wall".