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President Trump has been taking hostages for two years. He ordered an end to dreamers' protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, ordered an end to the temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people, and then forced a shutdown of the government, leaving 800,000 without a paycheck and inflicting financial and emotional pain on them, their families and (often small) businesses. And then he came up with a deal — such a deal! He would give partial relief to the dreamers and TPS people and get $5.7 billion for a wall; then he’d open the government.

Wait, you say. Wasn’t he the one who put DACA and TPS folks at risk, and haven’t the federal courts already given DACA beneficiaries a likely one-year reprieve? Well, yes. A burglar has broken into your home, has taken the silver and is now offering to lease it back to you for three years only — but first, give him a $5.7 billion edifice.

Alas, the press — fresh from a BuzzFeed beating — now presents Trump’s “offer” as serious. It’s not. Here is what would be a serious way to proceed:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) brings the bill to the floor and allows amendments.

After the amendment process is finished, the Senate votes.

The House puts together its own bill: permanent DACA and TPS relief, money for border security (not a wall) and a way to prevent future shutdowns (e.g., an automatic continuing resolution in case funding lapses).

The House passes its bill.

As the two bills go to a conference, the government is reopened.

The House and Senate then negotiate a resolution.

This does not reward hostage-taking. It allows the parties negotiate on even footing. It does not give McConnell and anti-immigration hard-liners the “out” that they won’t consider something Trump doesn’t want. Trump would be forced to decide at the end of the process either to veto a bill everyone else agrees upon or to sign a compromise measure — and he wouldn’t have the shutdown as a further bargaining chip.

Trump’s non-offer is instructive in three respects. First, his hard-line anti-immigrant supporters (e.g. Ann Coulter) already don’t like talk of “amnesty”; nothing short of deporting DACA recipients will do in their book. If McConnell votes and the Senate passes the president’s proposal, Republicans — including the president, we hope — will learn to ignore the most strident anti-immigrant voices and fulfill their obligation to negotiate without looking over their shoulders.

Second, Trump is plainly worried. Seeing the rotten polling for him and the wall, the impressive unity of the Democrats and McConnell’s unwillingness to help bail him out, Trump was forced to reverse his earlier pledge not to include DACA in the shutdown settlement. He blinked, albeit with his fingers crossed behind his back.

Third, if anyone still had doubts, Trump is the worst negotiator to occupy the Oval Office, in large part because he is utterly untrustworthy. We are in this predicament because Trump has repeated reneged on a deal (most recently a clean continuing resolution). Because he is entirely incapable of behaving honorably, Congress must act independently. McConnell should now be prodded to emerge from behind Trump’s skirts and negotiate in good faith as half of an equal branch of government. That might actually generate a reasonable compromise.

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Democrats have undergone their own evolution when it comes to Trump’s prized wall. After mocking it for the better part of Trump’s presidential campaign and his first year in office, congressional Democrats recently begrudgingly endorsed a massive infusion of cash for the proposal.

Doing so prompted backlash from some immigration advocates who believe Democrats too readily gave in on a wall. But for their part, Democratic lawmakers say permanent protections for dreamers facing imminent limbo — not to mention the political makeup of Washington — made them more willing to accept what was once anathema to them.

“Elections have consequences. Right?” Menendez said. “When Republicans control everything and you have a White House that is the most anti-immigrant White House I’ve ever seen that at the end of the day, you have to take some tough choices.”

Sensing an opening in the final days of haggling over the spending bill, the influential network of conservative groups funded by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch made a last-minute push to persuade the White House and congressional Republicans to take what the Democrats had initially offered. A leader of one of the Koch-affiliated groups, Daniel Garza of the LIBRE Initiative, said the organizations made the push because the omnibus was the “last train leaving the station.”

But when the legislation was ultimately released, there would be no dreamer protections, no dramatic boost in wall funding and no major changes to immigration policy. It would be unclear the next time Trump would get a shot at fulfilling a campaign pledge.

“Trump blew it; he got greedy and now he probably will not get his wall,” said Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies. “Thank goodness.”