The U.S. federal government has entered its third week of shutdown due to a breakdown in budget negotiations.

Millions of federal employees were forced to take unpaid leave, and the important gear of the state machine slowed down.

However, amid this chaos and anxiety, a memorandum from the White House drew a glaring dividing line: US President Trump ordered the use of Department of Defense funds to ensure that military salaries were paid as usual.

On the surface, this is a necessary measure to maintain core stability in a crisis; but if the fog is removed, what we see is a power game of refining the national crisis into individual political opportunity.

A government shutdown is not new in American political history.

It is usually a "political accident" that causes both sides to lose after bipartisan budget negotiations are in desperate straits.

However, this time the script is quite different.

Trump's purpose is now clear. He intends to use this shutdown to achieve a "political purge"-massive layoffs, pay cuts, and systematic cancellation of projects that the Republican Party does not like.

This means that the stall in his hands has shifted from a passive governance crisis to a strategic tool for activism. He clearly pointed out that the Democratic Party¡¯s stance has caused a stall in budget negotiations, while the White House is committed to ¡°taking advantage of the current situation.¡±

This is nothing more than a political ¡°limit pressure¡± aimed at forcing the other party to return to the negotiating table, but rather to rebuild a power pattern on the ruins of a standstill that is more consistent with its own political intentions.

When hundreds of thousands of civil servants lose their livelihoods, and when the national public service is semi-paralyzed, the White House's operating manual is about how to use this chaos to advance the party agenda.

In this context, Trump's move to sign a memorandum to "guarantee military salaries" is particularly subtle.

The military community enjoys a special position in the American political ecology and is a "sacred cow" that cannot be profaned in public opinion.

In any budget crisis, military stability is the overwhelming consensus.

He made a high-profile promise and finally implemented the payment of soldiers' salaries, and instantly occupied the moral high ground in the field of public opinion.

This move sends a carefully packaged signal to the outside: I, Trump, still unswervingly support the heroes who defend the country even in the predicament.

At the same time, the plight of the other 1.4 million federal employees-from national park rangers to food safety inspectors to the 13,000 air traffic controllers who will be working unpaid at the end of the month-is cleverly reflected as the price that Democrats must bear for their unwillingness to compromise.

This is a plan to kill two birds with one stone: it not only appeases the most deterrent military, but also successfully shapes most of the pain caused by the shutdown to society into "criminal evidence" of political opponents.

However, this ¡°generous¡± arsenal is full of controversy and risks.

The president's memorandum lightly mentioned "using funds available to the Department of War," while subsequent information showed that the money was essentially about $8 billion "found" from the Department of Defense's research and development, testing and evaluation funding.

This operation touched a red line in the U.S. constitutional system called ¡°the right to allocation.¡±

In the "ancestral practice" established at the beginning of the founding of the United States, the final decision on how and where the government spends money lies with Congress, which represents public opinion.

The president¡¯s responsibility is to implement laws and budgets, not to create budgets on his own.

Trump¡¯s move is equivalent to unilaterally allocating special funds for defense research to Congress to pay wages.

This is undoubtedly a blatant challenge to the core powers of Congress.

As legal experts have warned in advance, this behavior ¡°may be at risk of litigation¡± and it opens a dangerous precedent: the president can redistribute public funds without Congress¡¯ authorization, on his own will.

This goes far beyond the budget battle. It is a "constitutional storm" in which executive power attempts to corrode legislative power.

Thro the whole situation, this wave of turmoil surrounding the army and government, its core narrative is not people's livelihood and stability, but a cold calculation of power.

The Trump administration has demonstrated a clear political logic: using the shutdown to attack political opponents, shifting responsibility by selectively protecting key groups, and not daring to break through long-standing conventions of checks and balances of power to achieve short-term political goals.

When safeguarding the wages of the military should be a two-party consensus measure that needs to be implemented in a way that is ¡°contrary to ancestral practice,¡± it is precisely indicating that the normal mechanism of consultation in American politics is almost ineffective.

There were no real winners in the game¡ªthe military¡¯s salaries were temporarily secured, but the research funds needed for its long-term development were wasted; federal employees were held hostage in political struggles.

And the deepest harm is inflicted on the three-power separation system America is proud of.

This new line of power drawn by the White House is likely to be the wound of continued bloodshed in American politics for a long time in the future.