If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the shutdown, it’s that Donald Trump can in fact be beaten

His ending of the shutdown on Friday was a substantial vindication of the defenders of the US constitution

American politics is familiar with the concept of temporary things that are really permanent. It is conventional for candidates who are running for president to “suspend” their campaigns when it is obvious that they have been beaten.

Thus no one believes that Donald Trump’s deal to end the partial federal shutdown is “temporary”. The president has been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of House of Representatives, and the Democrats are not going to give him the funding he demanded for his Mexican border wall.

Indeed, in his long speech at the White House announcing his retreat, Mr Trump denied that he had ever wanted a wall along the whole border at all. Some of his speech was devoted to smart technology such as drones for more effective law enforcement, which was, in effect, a concession to Democrats’ arguments that better border security did not have to mean a wall.

Thus, if the president fails to get whatever it is that he now wants by the end of the three-week restoration of normal funding for federal government, few really believe he will carry out his blustery threat to “use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the constitution of the United States to address this emergency”. If he thought that was such a great idea, he would have done it by now.

This was an entirely foreseeable setback for Mr Trump, one that was indeed foreseen by The Independent. We wrote on Christmas Day and again on Thursday this week that the only thing that matters in US government shutdowns is which side gets the blame, and that the president has been losing that battle from the beginning. In between, on 4 January, we noted that he had “met his match” in Ms Pelosi.

So he had. His ending of the shutdown on Friday was a substantial vindication of those defenders of the US constitution, and of those who believe that it is strong enough to withstand the caprice of an individual holding its most powerful office who is unable to internalise its norms.

It turns out that a president cannot rule without congress. He needs it to vote money – and to invite him to deliver his State of the Union address in its chamber. Just as the US judicial system turned out to be strong enough to overturn Mr Trump’s Muslim travel ban, there are limits to what one autocratic personality can do.

On the other hand, Mr Trump’s opponents must learn the right lessons from this episode. The president’s concession on Friday was not a crushing defeat. Although he had suffered in the court of public opinion, the ground he lost was limited and he retains the approval of 40 per cent of the electorate. Indeed, although more Americans oppose the border wall than support it, it continues to be backed by a similar proportion of the people.

The president’s defeat ought to be embarrassing for him, but if we know one thing about Mr Trump it is that embarrassment is not something he experiences – and his supporters will probably believe that he has won a famous victory.

Mr Trump remains a formidable candidate to beat in the 2020 election. But Ms Pelosi has shown that, with strong leadership, resolute on national security, he can be beaten.