We begin today’s roundup with an excellent piece by Catherine Rampell on Trump’s art of the deal — which basically involves him backing out of his promises:
The only way to deal with Donald Trump is to not do deals with Donald Trump. The private sector has learned this; when will Congress?
For his entire career, our dealmaker in chief has relied on a not-so-secret technique for extracting supposedly good deals: He agrees to a given set of terms and then, at the last minute, reneges on them.
Eugene Robinson also dives into the current political dynamic, explaining that “Trump’s bluster camouflages great weakness” and that Democrats shouldn’t bow down to Trump’s demands:
For the new year, critics of President Trump should resolve not to be intimidated by the potential wrath of his vaunted political base. The only one who should cower before the Make America Great Again legions is Trump himself.
And he does fear them, bigly. The latest illustration is the way he chickened out on a bipartisan agreement to keep the government fully funded, instead forcing a partial shutdown over chump change for “the wall.” I use quotation marks because there never was going to be an actual, physical, continuous wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, much less one paid for by the Mexican government. The president is desperately trying to avoid acknowledging this and other realities before the 2020 election.
Anyone who thinks Trump is a master politician is wrong. He’s a master illusionist, which isn’t the same thing. Politicians can’t keep pulling rabbits out of empty hats forever. At some point, they face a reckoning, and Trump’s is well underway.
Here’s Eric Levitz’s take at New York magazine on Trump’s wall tantrum:
At first blush, this impasse over what divides a wall from a fence might look frivolous. But the semantic controversy is rooted in a substantive one. Simply put, the reason Congress can’t agree on what Trump’s wall is is that Trump can’t (honestly) say what it’s for.
Of course, the president has offered many dishonest rationales for his signature policy idea. He’s posited the wall as a means of keeping large numbers of Central Americans from seeking asylum in the United States, blocking dangerous narcotics from entering the country, and reducing illegal border crossings.
But building a giant wall across the southern border is not a rational policy solution to any of those (putative) problems.
At Politico, we see a preview of the Democratic strategy in the new year:
House Democrats — increasingly convinced they’re winning the shutdown fight with President Donald Trump — are plotting ways to reopen the government while denying the president even a penny more for his border wall when they take power Jan. 3.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her top lieutenants are considering several options that would refuse Trump the $5 billion he’s demanded for the wall and send hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees back to work, according to senior Democratic sources.
At The Daily Beast, Matt Miller and Mimi Rocah analyze Trump’s improper influencing of his acting Attorney General:
In pressuring Whitaker, who as acting attorney general oversees the investigation, the president was unquestionably trying to coerce him into blocking prosecutors in New York from either looking at or implicating him or his family members in criminal conduct. [...] In our view, that action clearly constituted a criminal attempt by the president to obstruct justice, one that is even more clear-cut than the president’s prior attempts to thwart the federal investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.
Meanwhile, journalist Elizabeth Drew (who covered Watergate) says impeachment is inevitable:
The word “impeachment” has been thrown around with abandon. The frivolous impeachment of President Bill Clinton helped to define it as a form of political revenge. But it is far more important and serious than that: It has a critical role in the functioning of our democracy. Impeachment was the founders’ method of holding a president accountable between elections. Determined to avoid setting up a king in all but name, they put the decision about whether a president should be allowed to continue to serve in the hands of the representatives of the people who elected him. [...]
The current presidential crisis seems to have only two possible outcomes. If Mr. Trump sees criminal charges coming at him and members of his family, he may feel trapped. This would leave him the choice of resigning or trying to fight congressional removal. But the latter is highly risky.
Paul Krugman details Republicans’ bad faith on economic policy:
As 2018 draws to an end, we’re seeing many articles about the state of the economy. What I’d like to do, however, is talk about something different — the state of economics, at least as it relates to the political situation. And that state is not good: The bad faith that dominates conservative politics at every level is infecting right-leaning economists, too.
This is sad, but it’s also pathetic. For even as once-respected economists abase themselves in the face of Trumpism, the G.O.P. is making it ever clearer that their services aren’t wanted, that only hacks need apply.
On a final note, over at USA Today, David Rothkopf, host of Deep State Radio, takes the long view on Trump’s legacy:
Read this list of wrongs and crimes and missteps and compound it with the ignorance and the incompetence and the absence of principles and the deficiency of character of this man. Think how each and any of them might have disqualified past leaders.
Think how you wouldn't allow such a man into your home or contact with your children and then of the power and prestige he has been given, the precious gifts of heritage that have been placed in his hands.
It is easy to grow numb to this. It is possible to become distracted by rage. But remembering what is at stake, we must focus on undoing this great wrong that took place in 2016 and seeking justice for the crimes that contributed to that and have unfolded since.