Pelosi and Shumer Have Only Just Begun Reining in Trump’

For most of his life, Donald Trump has lead a life where he has escaped consequences. Born to wealth, he escaped service in the Vietnam War by his father's buying of a medical excuse to win him a deferment.  Throughout his business career, he has used bankruptcy to ditch failed ventures and let the pain fall on others - others he typical failed to pay. When banks ceased loaning him money, he seems to have found Deutsche Bank's apparent Russian money laundering operation to keep his business going when he wasn't selling properties to Russian oligarchs in his own money laundering gambit.  Then in his first two years in the White House he had emasculated Republicans only too happy to engage in political fellatio so as to avoid primary challenges from Trump's unwashed, hate-filled base of support.  Now, the game has changed with the shift of control of the House of Representatives to Democrat control.  This, combined with a majority of Americans opposing Trump and his agenda, means Trump's in for a continuing shock.  A piece in The Daily Beast suggests that Trump had best brace himself for numerous political spankings.  Here are article excerpts:

So, having won round one so resoundingly, what should the Democrats do next about the wall?

One thing: Remember that this is Donald Trump’s problem. And Mitch McConnell’s, and Kevin McCarthy’s (who? The House minority leader). They’re the ones who are trying to push a minority position down the country’s throat. [Trump] The president in particular, of course. But majorities of Americans are against the wall and always have been. So let Trump turn that around, if he can.

It’s worth chortling again for a few paragraphs over how ridiculous and weak they made Trump look. Remember, this is a man who spent years, going way back before he started campaigning in 2015, saying over and over and over how easy being president would be. Bring the Chinese to heel? Very easy. Make Middle East peace? Please. Get Mexico to pay for the wall? Piece of cake. He’s been saying these things in books and television appearances for years.

I can’t imagine who believed him—and if anyone out there was a big enough idiot to do so, that’s their problem. But the point is that he believed it. . . . . But in January, he met reality.

Nancy Pelosi took him to the cleaners, and she deserves enormous credit. Her State of the Union gambit was just inspired. The awesome tell at the way she discombobulated Trump was that he couldn’t even come up with a nickname for her. Did you see that? “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her…” Wow, Don, good one! Her first name!

Taking nothing away from her, though, it wasn’t all Pelosi. Chuck Schumer was the one who goaded Trump into accepting responsibility for the shutdown at that Dec. 11 meeting.

And it was right after those [Senate votes last week] votes that McConnell called Chuck Schumer into his office. McConnell wanted Schumer to agree to a down payment on the wall. Schumer said no and counter-offered a continuing resolution and put together a conference committee to negotiate this. And this is exactly what’s happening.

I’ve followed this stuff closely for many years, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve complained about the Democrats wilting during some congressional confrontation, not staying unified, and getting their hats handed to them by Republicans. Well—no more. The Democrats can play hardball now. They did it already on health care and tax reform, when they didn’t lose a single vote. And there’s no reason they shouldn’t do more of it going forward, on the upcoming debt ceiling fight, on budget stuff, and in the House on investigations and subpoenas of every kind. They have the leverage now to deny Trump a win on anything.

So this week, this conference committee that Schumer suggested will start their talks. The Democratic conferees are Richard Durbin, Pat Leahy, and Jon Tester from the Senate; and from the House, a sextet led by Nita Lowey of upstate New York. They’re mostly pretty senior, and the only lefty in the bunch is Barbara Lee of Oakland. The Senate Republicans are led by Richard Shelby of Alabama, who’s plenty conservative but not really a MAGA fire-breather.

[T]hey might find a way to cut a deal. And maybe the Democrats should cut one—if  and only if they get just massive concessions on Dreamers and temporary protected status people and whatever else.

But what they absolutely should not do in this case is make a deal for the sake of seeming like reasonable people. Healthy majorities of Americans are against the wall and think it’s basically pointless or won’t do the job Trump swears it will do. So the position they’re representing right now—no wall—is the reasonable position. They don’t need to budge an inch from that.

Trump already told The Wall Street Journal that he'll shut the government down again and considers a deal to be less than a 50-50 shot. He has probably persuaded everyone he’s going to persuade by now. He can buy all the duct tape from here to Laredo and it still won’t change things. And if it comes to him declaring his emergency powers, then so be it. That will be really popular.

Easy? His life has been easy. Life tends to be that way when you start it with $300 million. But he lived his whole life in a bubble of no consequences. Those days are gone. He owes consequences a very large bill indeed, and on a number of fronts, it’s about to come due.

Trump Will Probably Cave to Nancy Pelosi

With family members and friends on furlough and unpaid as a result of the Trump forced government shutdown, I am sensitive to the financial concerns of such people who have mortgages to pay, food to buy, and children to cloth and support even if Trump does not.  Here in Virginia, one can hope that federal workers will vent their revenge on Republicans in the upcoming 2019 Virginia elections.  Flipping the Virginia General Assembly to full Democrat control would be a nice way to "flip the bird" to Trump and Vichy Republicans.  In the shorter term, the question is when and if Trump will capitulate to Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats. A piece in New York Magazine predicts - I hope the prediction proves true - Trump will fold and lie to his base that he "won"  - a lie they will gladly and blindly accept.  The piece also looks at the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans who still place party and personal aspirations ahead of the good of the country.  Here are highlights:

Pelosi is the most seasoned and arguably the most impressive leader that the Democrats currently have, the party’s presidential aspirants included. When she talks about the wall being fundamentally immoral and un-American, as she did upon reassuming the Speakership this week, she is drawing a line she won’t cross. Strictly as a political matter, she’s holding too many cards to back down. Trump’s exuberant embrace of ownership of the shutdown in last month’s Oval Office meeting is self-incriminating video he can’t claw back. The record of the Senate Republicans’ pre-holiday vote to fund the government and avert a shutdown can’t be erased just because Mitch McConnell, deferring to Trump, now refuses to bring the exact same legislation back to the floor. And the pain a prolonged shutdown will inflict will metastasize, inflicting political pain on the GOP’s narrow Senate majority as well.
 Trump says that most federal employees directly affected by the shutdown are Democrats. Even if that could be proved, it’s irrelevant. Not having a clue about how government works, [Trump] the president doesn’t seem to realize that the shutdown will reach deeply into the private sector. Four out of ten people working for the federal government are contractors, according to a 2017 analysis cited by the Washington Post. Small vendors who provide everything from cafeteria workers in government facilities to IT services to government offices will suffer. The absence of federal employees in Washington who approve paperwork essential to the smooth running of big and small business alike will disrupt households in all 50 states. They will call their senators. Something will have to give.

What will? The two senators who are already talking about defecting, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, have little choice but to do so: They are the two GOP incumbents up for reelection in 2020 in states won by Hillary Clinton. . . . Martha McSally, appointed to her seat in purple-ish Arizona and also up in 2020, may be another gettable Republican vote. There are other potential wild cards, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and the retiring Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. But there’s also a scenario where the impulsive Trump gets bored or distracted and moves on to other battles of a more existential urgency. The investigations being conducted by Robert Mueller, the Southern District of New York, and the new Democratic House have not taken a break for the shutdown. Whatever new results they bring will command his attention with or without any House move toward impeachment.

When Trump capitulates on the shutdown, he’ll say he’s “won” no matter what the particulars are. He’s already been readying that plan . . . . He knows that his base will buy any victory he claims, and it’s likely that the hard-liners at Fox News, including Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, will get with the program as well when there’s no other way out.

For all his showboating, one senator who will not break with the party line on the shutdown is Romney, who is on record supporting Trump’s push for the wall. . . . . As many have said apropos of Trump, people don’t change in their 70s. That’s equally true of Romney, a vacillator and flip-flopper who started backtracking from his op-ed within 24 hours of its publication by the Washington Post, much as he had backtracked on his 2016 criticisms of Trump . . . . The real point of Romney’s piece, despite his denials, is to at least leave the door open for a presidential run. And this has led to a certain amount of Washington speculation imagining a 2020 GOP presidential primary in which Flake, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio all run to restore sanity to their party in a post-Trump era.

They may run, but it’s too little and too late. . . . . The GOP is the Trumpist party. Whenever and however Trump leaves office, the notion that a Flake or a Romney might restore the old regime is a fantasy — just as it was a nonstarter when a previous generation of Establishment Republicans typified by Nelson Rockefeller and Romney’s father, George, imagined they could thwart the rise of the Goldwater-Reagan revolution. Trump’s base will regard the GOP Trump critics, meek as they are, as saboteurs of the cause, as indeed they characterized Romney this week.

Trump's Narrative vs. Pelosi's Subpoenas: The Ground is Shifting Beneath Republicans

With the Democrat takeover of control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the days of Republicans killing investigations in to Donald Trump's likely criminality and perhaps worse are over.   While sadly re-elected, Devin Nunes' agenda of cover ups and conspiring with Trump are over.  Longer term the results in urban and suburban districts ought to send warning flags to Republicans.  As the cities and suburbs grow and rural populations shrink - and aging whites die off -  the day may be fast approaching where the GOP agenda of racism, bigotry, and reverse Robin Hood no longer wins in many statewide races outside of backward rural/red states which are the federal equivalent of welfare recipients that they so strongly condemn.  The big unanswered question also remains of what House and Mueller investigations of Trump may reveal .  A piece in Politico looks at the new political reality:

Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it.

They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the balance of his first term, much less with a credible path to a second.

Those things Democrats did not get. To the contrary, the GOP defeat was not nearly as severe as the Democratic one in 2010 . . . . This leaves 2018 as the “Yes, but” election—not fully satisfying but by no means fully deflating for partisans of either side.

Yes: the Democratic march into once-unfavorable suburban terrain across the country was impressive. No amount of prattle about the “expectations game” or historical averages can diminish the reality that Nancy Pelosi is poised to retake the speaker’s gavel and the vast appropriations and investigatory power this gives the opposition party to check a hostile executive.

But: There is scant evidence of a mandate for a scorched-earth pursuit of Trump, and Tuesday’s gains in the Senate for Republicans (as well as the recent Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle that likely contributed to this outcome) underline the risks of this approach. . . . the electoral path Trump navigated to the presidency in 2016 remains plausible in 2020.

But: The midterms offered redundant evidence (some GOP strategists have been warning of this for a generation) that the party’s base is predominately rural in a country growing more urban and suburban, predominately white and culturally conservative in a country growing more diverse and culturally tolerant. Do Republicans really think that losing a majority of people who voted – as they did in 2016 and did again Tuesday night – but clinging to power through institutions designed to buffer democracy like the Senate and Electoral College is a wise strategy long-term?

The suburbs, which formed the bedrock of the Republican Party for half a century, are increasingly Democratic ground. The slow suburban exodus from the GOP has accelerated and even expanded beyond the Midwest and Northeast to the South and across the Sunbelt. Name the big metro – Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – and chances are there’s a Republican incumbent who lost Tuesday night or barely escaped.

By accident or design, however, divided government of the sort Trump will now preside over is the historical norm. In the 38 years since Ronald Reagan’s victory, presidents have faced having at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the opposition party in 28 years.

In general, however, those presidents had a degree of modesty about their new circumstances that would be unusual, so far, for Trump. . . . No one is expecting Trump to come forward in coming days with a message of self-critique or self-correction that by all evidence he believes is wholly unnecessary. In fact, [Trump] the president is likely to cherry-pick the results, pointing to the red-state Senate romp as evidence of the popularity of his agenda while dismissing the suburban losses as minimal, a culling of losers and malcontents that will ultimately strengthen the GOP herd.

Trump’s response was typical of the night’s mixed outcome: Yes, he kept the Senate, but was happy to avert his gaze from whatever traps House Democrats have in store for him.

One can hope that judicious House investigations and the Mueller investigation will ultimately expose Trump - and hopefully Pence as well - and help even red states to lurch back to objective reality.