Republican lawmakers are struggling to coordinate their message with President Trump heading into a divided Congress after he pulled the rug out from them once again by declaring he would be “proud” to shut down the government.

Trump shocked Republicans, who were preparing to blame Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a potential partial shutdown, when he said he would take sole responsibility for shuttering federal agencies if Congress doesn’t meet his demand for $5 billion in wall funding.

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Trump’s theatrics left GOP lawmakers dumbfounded, and they pressed Vice President Pence at a Tuesday lunch for an explanation of Trump’s off-script swerve.

But Pence could only tell GOP lawmakers that “it was an interesting conversation,” according to senators in the room.

When asked what the president’s game plan was to get out of what many GOP lawmakers see as a blind alley, Pence told senators that a solution has yet to emerge.

It’s been conventional wisdom in Washington since the shutdown battles of the mid-1990s that the party seen at fault suffers the most political damage.

“It doesn’t help with the messaging because we’ve spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how not to get labeled with the blame for a shutdown,” said one Republican senator.

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Senate Republicans said coordination with the White House will be especially important in the 116th Congress because Trump will be at the top of the ballot in 2020, when the GOP will have to defend 22 seats in the upper chamber — more than twice as many as in 2018.

“The backlash against Trump could be even bigger with him on the ballot, even though it was big in this last election,” said a second GOP senator, who pointed to the Democrats’ dominance in suburban areas in last month’s midterm elections.

WASHINGTON — Forces loyal to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are waging an increasingly public war against Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, the new darling of Democratic activists, as the two men weigh whether to seek the party's presidential nomination in 2020.

The main line of attack against O'Rourke is that he isn't progressive enough — that he's been too close to Republicans in Congress, too close to corporate donors and not willing enough to use his star power to help fellow Democrats — and it is being pushed almost exclusively by Sanders supporters online and in print.

It's been the first flashpoint in what promises to be a politically bloody primary.

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O'Rourke's ability to connect with younger and progressive white voters — Sanders' source of strength in his losing 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton — puts him in direct competition with the Vermont senator.

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Sanders supporters insist there's nothing coordinated about the attacks on O'Rourke and note Sanders himself and his top allies have said nothing about O'Rourke. Sanders' is an unusually decentralized political world, with a loose collection of activists and operatives who often take actions without direction or approval from any central authority. But they acknowledge that there's increasing public examination of his record.

It started with David Sirota, a liberal activist and journalist who worked for Sanders many years ago. In a long tweetstorm, Sirota noted that O'Rourke had received more donations from the oil and gas industry than any candidate in the 2018 cycle other than Cruz.