"The president believes he has the upper hand," reads the subhead of a Vanity Fair article as the White House schemes over a national emergency declaration in order to fund Donald Trump’s border wall.
Seriously, how many more times are Trump and his crackerjack aides going to think they're just moments away from seizing victory on the wall? Almost every article about White House thinking on the matter includes at least one paragraph explaining that team Trump thinks he’s got leverage on this. So how about a little review of the record to date: Trump got trounced in the midterms, Trump got trounced in the State of the Union standoff, Trump got trounced in the shutdown standoff.
But that’s just the beginning—Trump misplayed the shutdown standoff so badly that his approval ratings tanked, giving Senate Republicans just enough spine to start rebelling against a man almost none of them ever liked to begin with. He's so weak now that when the Senate voted Thursday 68-to-23 to rebuke Trump's spontaneous drawdown of troops in Syria and Afghanistan, fully 43 of 53 GOP Senators voted against Trump. He lost over 80 percent of the GOP caucus.
So now Trump has spent the week trashing bipartisan congressional negotiations as a "waste of time" and hinting that he'll ultimately pull the national emergency escape hatch to get his border wall.
"I think I’ve set the table very nicely,” Trump told the New York Times on Thursday, speaking from his alternate universe. Only someone as pigheaded as Trump could believe he's presently well positioned. Several GOP senators have already warned him against going nuclear on the wall. And given the fact that 80 percent of the GOP senate caucus voted to rebuke him just this week, he'd be a total fool to trust that they won't desert him all over again.
And yet, Vanity Fair writes, "Trump, with the encouragement of his 2020 campaign manager, seems to believe he still has the upper hand." It's like the most self-defeating "fake it till ya make it" strategy ever. Go in with a crap hand, show it to everybody at the table immediately, then place your bet, close your eyes, cross your fingers, and wait for victory to be yours!