Photo credit: Official White House photo by Tia Dufour
It had to be one of the strangest surrenders in a hostage negotiation ever broadcast nationwide on live television, but then Donald Trump is one of the strangest presidents this nation has ever had. Because so much of what Trump says publicly is either provably false or completely unintelligible, everyone watching had to listen closely to understand exactly what the president was saying.
Trump, who insisted he’d never end a government shutdown until Democrats appropriated billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars for a border wall, was announcing he was ending the government shutdown without any money at all being appropriated for his wall. That was certainly great news for the 800,000 federal employees Trump was holding hostage by either locking them out of their jobs or forcing them to work without pay for more than a month. It also was a relief for Americans everywhere endangered by the loss of safety inspections for airplanes, food and prescription drugs and countless other routine government protections the country used to take for granted until Trump became president.
In his announcement reopening the government, Trump sped right past his capitulation to Democrats to begin repeating all his dishonest, inflammatory arguments for spending billions of dollars on the worthless U.S.-Mexican border wall Trump promised voters numerous times that Mexico would pay for. Trump’s racist lies about a wall preventing terrorism from a murderous mob of blood-thirsty, brown-skinned immigrants were overwhelmingly rejected in November’s elections that flipped 40 Republican congressional seats to give Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats United Against the Wall
Trump’s reopening of the government is officially only for three weeks, while Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate negotiate over border security. But there’s very little chance the results will include any funds for a border wall. Democrats are united behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) against the wall. Even more important, the reason Democrats are so strongly united in their opposition is that most Americans don’t want Trump’s absurd wall, either.
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Approval ratings for Trump and Republicans plummeted during the president’s irrational shutdown. We know Trump is not a normal, stable human being with predictable behavior, but finally ending the government shutdown was overwhelmingly popular since it accomplished absolutely nothing other than inflicting unnecessary pain on the nation. Now that it’s over, not even Trump is moronic enough to close down the government again in three weeks when he doesn’t get his dumb wall.
Trump and Republicans have done for Pelosi exactly what they did for former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA): They’ve increased the national popularity of a powerful woman they’ve attacked for years. Remember Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan partying with Trump in the Rose Garden to celebrate the House passing a bill destroying ACA health coverage for more than 20 million Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions? That’s when Americans realized everything they would lose if Republicans succeeded in destroying the ACA. Protecting and expanding affordable health care has been a winning issue for Democrats ever since.
Demonizing a Leader
For years, Pelosi was featured in Republican campaign ads all over the country as the scariest woman in the history of the world. Demonizing the former Democratic Speaker of the House was a handy way for Republicans to rile up hatred for the two human species many of their voters found most threatening. Pelosi was not only a powerful woman in a man’s job, but she also was from San Francisco—the city where everybody was required by law to be homosexual.
The real reason why Republicans always feared Pelosi’s return as speaker is obvious. Her initial tenure as Speaker from 2007 to 2011 was the most successful House leadership in modern times. John Boehner and Ryan—the pathetic Republican pretenders who followed her—were national embarrassments. Pelosi’s original version of the ACA passed by the House was far more progressive than the final version. It included a Medicare-for-all-style public option that would have lowered prices and improved benefits of every competing private insurance plan.
Trump is desperately denying his humiliation by Pelosi, who “sent him packing like a little boy” with his wall—to use Trump’s own description of running Scott Walker out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s latest temporary chief-of-staff, claims the president still could declare a national emergency to spend billions of dollars to build his wall without an appropriation from Congress. In a normal world, such an outrageous move would immediately be declared unconstitutional; even in Trump World, it would require extraordinary support from cowardly congressional Republicans and a totally corrupt Supreme Court.
In her first month back as House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi has successfully built her own big, beautiful wall, and Trump is running right into it going full-speed—just like Wile E. Coyote did every time the Road Runner painted a tunnel on the side on a mountain.
