Trump Continues To Negotiate With Himself Over Shutdown
When the man-child-in-chief blocked a bipartisan Congressional delegation led by Nancy Pelosi from using government resources to travel to consult with our allies and visit with our troops in Afghanistan, he described the trip as a “public relations event”. That, of course, is because, for Trump, there is no such thing as policy, only personal enrichment and PR is one of his primary tools to attain that.
With that in mind, Trump views the current political trap that he incredibly set for himself on the government shutdown as simply a PR problem that must be overcome. He has apparently ranted to aides that he is getting killed on the shutdown, ranting at chief-of-staff Mulvaney, “We are getting crushed!”. His answer was to once again stage another PR stunt in a pathetic repeat of the Oval Office address, apparently in the magical belief he can turn public opinion.
The fact that Trump didn’t even consult with Democrats on this new proposal to trade funding for the wall for temporary and weak protections for DACA and TPS recipients illustrated more clearly than anything that this was not a serious proposal. More importantly, it was less a proposal directed at Democrats than it was Trump desperately trying to find what kind of concessions he could make that might be acceptable to his ever-shrinking base. Trump was basically negotiating with himself.
Democrats did not even need to respond in any way to this ridiculous proposal. First, it is clear that this deal would never make it through either the House or the Senate. More importantly, the people who really had veto power over this proposal were on Trump’s right, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, et al. Coulter provided her answer before Trump even spoke, tweeting, “Trump proposes amnesty. We voted for Trump and got Jeb!”. I imagine Trump will have to walk back this proposal by the end of the holiday weekend.
Lastly, as I’ve written before, there is no one, Democrat or Republican, who has any faith that Trump will stick to any deal on this issue at this point. Trump, by his own admission, owns this shutdown. Democrats have no incentive to give him anything to end it other than what Republicans had already agreed to before Trump backed out of that deal. Trump can not see it, but the shutdown will not end until Trump totally caves on the border wall and suffers a humiliating political defeat. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, Trump refuses to believe that so we will have to endure more PR stunts and more attempts to negotiate with himself before this ends.