As the partial government shutdown stretches into its 18th day, with no obvious end in sight, Donald Trump is “fighting a virtual one-man messaging battle for his border wall,” and he’s “growing frustrated that he doesn’t have more public defenders in his shutdown fight with Congressional Democrats,” according to Politico.

So Trump has undertaken “a manic, one-man public-relations effort to sell the shutdown” while griping “to associates that he hasn’t seen enough administration officials on the airwaves defending him during the shutdown fight.”

Trump and Vice President Mike Pence met with 20 outside surrogates about the shutdown on Monday, and “aides continue to show Trump television clips featuring outside advisers offering praise on cable news shows,” but Trump “has cited the diminishing praise from within his own ranks, wondering why more of the people who work for him are not stepping up to defend him on the television airwaves.”

Publicly, Trump claims to have broad support for shutting down the government over border wall funding, but privately, “he’s sitting there going, ‘Why the f–k isn’t there anybody saying good stuff about me? Why is there nobody on TV that’s defending me?'” a former senior administration official tells Politico.

New York Magazine has a possible explanation. “Nobody in the administration had a clear understanding of just what a shutdown would entail,” and “they blundered into it almost by accident, without any understanding of what they are doing nor any plan for success,” they write. “Democrats don’t have any incentive to give Trump even a “token ransom” to reopen the government, and “voters in general tend to blame the president for problems. This holds true even when Congress is responsible for the problems, but it especially holds true when the president personally engineers the calamity and announces beforehand on camera that he won’t blame the other side for it.”

Trump is expected to discuss a “National Security crisis on our Southern Border” during his primetime address 9:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday evening. The televised speech, which numerous cable-news networks agreed to air, prompted Democrats to call for “equal airtime” to counter Trump’s “malice and misinformation.”

Trump’s upcoming address follows a string of other freewheeling media appearances in recent days, including the wide-ranging cabinet meeting that included an altered “Game of Thrones” poster; and his surprise, first appearance at the White House press briefing room.