Should there be free broadcast time for another fundraising grift by Individual-1? Is the spectacle of more lies worth 90 minutes of prime-time air, regardless of the venue.
At its core, the fight is about who controls the agenda for the rest of Trump's first term, and which party is best positioned for the 2020 elections.
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"It's not about a wall anymore," Charlie Sykes, an MSNBC political analyst and editor in chief of the conservative opinion journal The Bulwark. "This has become a stand-in for the entire culture clash."
So far, indications are that he has been failing the test. He still has no wall. His government is in its fifth week of partial shutdown. He has been shut out of the House, where generations of presidents have delivered State of the Union addresses, regardless of personal popularity or political persuasion. His poll numbers are tanking. And his latest gambit — aimed at cracking Democrats' wall of opposition to his border barrier — infuriated some portions of his own base.
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While the Senate is slated to vote on Trump's proposal and a Democratic plan to re-open the government without money for the wall on Thursday, the cancellation of Trump's address to Congress next week and his remark to reporters that he will announce another venue for the speech suggest that both he and Pelosi think the shutdown is likely to continue for at least another week — while new moves suggest the Trump administration thinks it could stretch on for far longer.
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To some extent, Sykes said, Trump already has caved on the wall. He once promised it would be paid for by Mexico, span the border and be made of concrete. Now, he sees it as a slatted steel structure on parts of the border, and he says, in contradiction of most economists, that it will pay for itself in the form of revenue reaped from taxing the profits of U.S. companies that do business with Mexico under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
Congress still hasn't approved that deal, and most economists say that any increased revenue over its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement, will be relatively negligible.
But that's all the more reason Trump is boxed into trying to get something he can claim is a wall — and all the more reason for Pelosi to find ways like denying him a State of the Union venue to make it more painful for him to hold out for it.
"This is the ultimate test of his manhood," Sykes said. "And we know how Donald Trump feels about his manhood."
www.nbcnews.com/...