Seventeen days after shutting down the government to extort border-wall money from the public, President Trump is desperate to change the politics of his impulsive decision. And that’s going to take a LOT of lying to a LOT of people. How much? His current plan is to (again) whip voters into a panic about a non-existent national-security crisis at the border, and do it during a prime-time Oval Office address.
Trump intends to deliver the address on Tuesday night, and all broadcast and cable networks intend to carry it live. This is piping hot bullshit, and not just because Trump’s never given a speech without lying about Democrats, the media, immigrants, the border, or some combination thereof. In 2014, President Obama asked the networks to carry an immigration address live, and they unanimously declined, declaring the matter “overtly political.” That was probably the wrong decision, but that’s the standard they set, even though Obama didn’t have Trump’s habit of lying constantly and trashing the free press.
On Thursday, Trump will fly to the border to, in Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s words, “meet with those on the frontlines of the national security and humanitarian crisis.” Again, there is no national security crisis, and the humanitarian crisis along the border—which the shutdown is making much worse—is largely one of Trump’s own creation.
Should all else fail, Trump might even declare a state of national emergency, and order the military to build a border wall on seized private land. This would be extremely illegal, mostly because there is no state of emergency. (Side note: If you’d like your head to explode, imagine what Republicans would have done if Barack Obama reacted to losing control of the House in 2010 by shutting down the government and declaring a state of emergency to grant immigrants citizenship.)
By contrast to all this flailing, Democrats remain a picture of calm (with some unrelated dancing).
Senate Democrats have begun filibustering all Republican legislation that doesn’t pertain to funding the government. House and Senate Democratic leaders remain resolute that they will not cave to Trump’s demand for border wall funding. If Democrats were in danger of losing the politics of the shutdown fight, they’d be acting more like Trump.
From Brian: There’s a reason Vice President Mike Pence (remember him? The guy that’s always talking about Trump’s shoulders?) is pleading with Democrats to meet Trump’s extortion demand half way, and vulnerable Senate Republicans like Cory Gardner and Susan Collins are calling on Mitch McConnell to reopen the government, and Trump has reportedly ordered his aides to bring the shutdown fight to an end, “without him appearing to have capitulated to Democrats.” They shut down the government on purpose, in plain view, and now everyone’s mad at them about it. There’s more Democrats should do to capitalize on Trump’s self-inflicted political crisis, but at this point the big mystery is how Trump will extricate himself from it, and when.
