Just hours after caving in and agreeing to reopen the government for three weeks, President Trump returned to his threats.
The president announced that if he can’t get money for constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, he’ll declare a national emergency, something he’s repeatedly threatened during the shutdown.
“We’ll work with the Democrats and negotiate and if we can’t do that, then we’ll do a — obviously we’ll do the emergency because that’s what it is. It’s a national emergency,” he declared during a Friday afternoon meeting shortly after his Rose Garden speech announcing he’d accepted a deal with no wall funding.
That guarantee is further than Trump went in the earlier speech, when he said that if he doesn’t get the deal he wants “either the government will shut down on Feb. 15 again, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made it clear that he wasn’t going to get what he wants, however.
“Have I not been clear on the wall? No, I’ve been very clear on the wall,” she said in a Friday afternoon press conference.
With Trump’s major cave on Friday, he appeared to lose any remaining leverage he thought he had over Democrats to force a deal on border security to his liking.
Words fail me.
Mmkay …
A smarter man (and it does not take much to qualify as smarter than our president) would have realized back when he welched on his DACA deal in back in eaerly-2018 that he was going to make any future negotiations much harder for himself. Pelosi & Schumer struck a deal with Trump, and then Trump backed out of the deal. Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me. The only sane conclusion that Pelosi and Schumer can draw from the experience is that Trump does not negotiate in good faith, and therefore negotiating with him is not worth the effort. He should have thought about those sort of long term consequences back when he welched. If, however, the president were capable of considering long-term consequences, this would be a very different administration.
Now Donnie is trying to win back Ann Coulter plus the deplorables of which there are far too many.
Schumer said he hoped Spankee learned something. Clearly, he didn’t and Prez Coulter is pulling the strings again.
The more important question is whether McTurtle learned anything from this.
Guess we’ll find out in three weeks.