The story isn’t whether Trump is unhappy or whether he’ll sign the spending deal. It’s that he was defeated.
The NY Times with a nicer view of the Trump cave than I have:
Five Key Takeaways From the Tentative Deal on Border Security
- Republicans are sending the president a message
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Trump has a messaging challenge
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The president still has a card in his pocket: a national emergency
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Congress showed it could function normally
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‘In principle’ does not mean the deal is final
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Trump’s failed shutdown strategy produced an even worse deal than he started with
The fact that Republicans signed off shows how little leverage they have.
But it’s all rather transparently geared toward saving face at this point, rather than winning the debate. Assuming Republicans can’t get anything more out of this deal than they have right now, it will be quite the capitulation. Trump could have taken $1.6 billion and/or declared a national emergency last year, before all this went down; he will have gotten basically nothing for shutting down the government for 35 days.
And he might just have to take it.
Brendan Nyhan/Medium:
A Politician’s Authenticity Doesn’t Matter
Who cares how Kirsten Gillibrand ate her fried chicken?
With the 2020 presidential campaign officially underway, the worst excesses of political reporting are once again rearing their ugly heads — most notably, the media’s preoccupation with candidates’ authenticity, an obsession that has marred so many recent presidential campaigns. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest victim of the authenticity police on Saturday, after she had the audacity to ask whether it was appropriate to use her fingers or a fork to eat the fried chicken she was served at a women’s brunch in South Carolina.
New York’s Frank Rich asked on Twitter, “Is there anything Gillibrand has done that is not contrived and opportunistic? I ask the question seriously. Replies welcome.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni went further, writing that “you got the sense that she would have grabbed that chicken with her pinkie toes if she’d been told to… Anything to conform. Anything to please.”
The incident, just the latest entry in the growing pantheon of political food gaffes, reveals how the media too often covers presidential candidates on the trail. With most candidates’ speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate’s strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate’s personality.
Max Boot/WaPo
Trump’s superpower is his shamelessness
Warner Bros. is about to release a movie about a 14-year-old boy who can become an adult superhero by saying the magical incantation “Shazam!” Sadly for the movie’s makers, the political world has already anticipated their plot line. For dwelling in the White House is a childish former reality-TV star who has the ability to transform himself into a superhuman politician capable of leaping tall piles of manure in a single bound and bending mere facts in his bare hands. What is the superpower that allows President Trump to fight a never-ending battle for ego gratification, money-making and the Trump Way? It is a word so ingrained in him that he has no need to even say it: “Shameless!”
Imagine what would happen if our hero were afflicted with self-doubt or self-awareness, irony or shame. It would be a crippling defect, turning him into a mere mortal who would be incapable of attaining and maintaining the nation’s highest office — like those notorious “losers,” Bob Dole, Mo Udall and John McCain, who were cursed with an overabundance of wit.
Mercifully free of these handicaps and hang-ups, Super Trump is able to base his entire political career on anti-immigrant demagoguery — while employing undocumented immigrants to build his signature tower in New York (a lair worthy of Bruce Wayne) and to service his hotels and golf courses.
Bill Scher/Politico:
How to Choose the Most Electable Democrat in 2020
A field guide for progressives—and moderates—who say they’re willing to sacrifice their policy wish list to beat Donald Trump.
Democrats say they care more about winning in 2020 than anything else. In a Monmouth University poll, when asked to choose between “a Democrat you agree with on most issues but would have a hard time beating Donald Trump,” or “a Democrat you do not agree with on most issues but would be a stronger candidate against Donald Trump,” Democrats threw their policy preferences under the bus by 56 percent to 33 percent. And when Democrats were asked, in a CNN poll, which of seven candidate attributes are “extremely important,” they ranked “has a good chance of beating Donald Trump” the highest, at 49 percent. Ranked second-to-last with 25 percent was “holds progressive positions on the issues.”
These are disturbing numbers to some on the left. A growing chorus of voices has argued that electability is a nonsensical ruse concocted to box out true progressives in favor of timid moderates. “It’s alchemy and a crock,” scoffed Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, noting that nominating Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders didn’t save us from Trump, and picking John Kerry over Howard Dean didn’t stop George W. Bush’s reelection. New York’s Eric Levitz further suggested that Trump’s unpopularity makes the electability metric, however slippery, irrelevant for 2020: “In all probability, it will take only a minimally politically competent Democrat to get him out.” The Week’s Joel Mathis recently counseled primary voters, “Don't ask yourself which candidate is electable. Ask which candidate you want to elect, then act accordingly.”
However, just because electability is not like pornography—you can’t always know it when you see it—doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
What about Biden and Bernie?
With such an extremely diverse field (ideologically and otherwise), the question for Biden remains: Does he have to run for Democrats to reclaim the White House? It’s not like there are no moderates or no white men with Rust Belt appeal or no experienced pols already in the race or about to jump in. Put it this way: Does the Democratic field need Biden if it has Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) plus, possibly, a couple governors? …
Sanders also suffers from some of the same maladies as Biden; he’s old chronologically, a well-worn political face (i.e., not exactly an “outsider”), male and white. Why does the party need Bernie and his baggage with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and plenty of fresher progressive faces available? Nevertheless, he still may run.
The question for Biden and Sanders is not whether it is too late to prepare for a race, gather staff, build a network and raise money. Given their name ID and track record, they can do all of those things faster and more successfully than most of the candidates already in the field. Rather, with a crowded field now populated with candidates who have some advantages they don’t have, and without some of their disadvantages, the real question is: Why bother?
Peter Wehner/The Atlantic:
What I’ve Gained by Leaving the Republican Party
I’m more willing to listen to those I once thought didn’t have much to teach me.
When I was a card-carrying member of a political party, I wasn’t automatically blinded to other points of view, or unable to challenge conventional orthodoxy. I did it on issues ranging from climate change, to the Tea Party’s anti-government rhetoric, to the characterological and temperamental defects of Newt Gingrich; so have many others. Nor did I knowingly put party above country. That’s a common charge made against party loyalists, when in fact most members of a political party believe that the success of their party is tied to the success of their country. They might be wrong, but that’s how many of them see things.
But here’s what I think does happen. People who are part of a tribe—political, philosophical, religious, ethnic—are less willing to call out their own side’s offenses. That’s human nature. To be sure, some are more willing to show independence of judgment than others, but none shows complete intellectual independence. I certainly didn’t.