Donald, Nancy and Chuck Hit a Wall

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I just saw Trump on MSNBC, from Fort Myers, saying there would be no agreement on DACA that didn’t include funding for his wall.

“We have to have an understanding…that the wall will be funded,” the president said on the Ft. Myers’ tarmac. “Otherwise we’re not doing any deal.”

“If we don’t have the wall,” he said, “we’re doing nothing.”

This is a shift from what he said earlier this morning, before he left Washington for Florida. Earlier this morning, he just said “strong border security” without making the wall a condition. The wall would be funded later, he said.

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Josh Marshall wrote, also before Trump got to Fort Myers —

The word this morning is that leaders Pelosi and Schumer say Trump agreed to make DACA law as part of a deal that upped funding for “border security” but not for a wall. But Trump came out and said there’s no deal. So it’s all a mess and a big dispute.

I think if you look closely, that’s not quite what happened….

…The Democrats came out of the meeting last night saying they’d agreed to make DACA law as part of a bill that would include border security but not a wall. The White House put out a different statement that didn’t say quite the same thing but very conspicuously did not mention the wall.

Was this a “deal” or “agreement”? The Dems didn’t say they had a “deal”, which I take to mean they’d hashed out the specifics and terms. They said they’d agreed to do this kind of legislation: DACA plus Border Security minus Wall. This is basically a semantic difference. The words (deal or agreement) can mean anything you want them to. The key thing in my mind is that if you look closely, I don’t see where they’re really disagreeing on what happened. If Trump or the White House had come out this morning and said, “No way. The price for DACA is the Wall,” that would be a major disagreement. They have not done that.

However, what he was saying in Fort Myers just now was that they had to agree to fund the wall some time in the future, or the deal or agreement or whatever is off.

Let’s just say that Trump has a bad case of the flip flops, and not just about DACA. Today, Gail Collins writes that Trump shifts positions on tax cuts almost hourly. His only written tax plan, which he insists that Congress enact immediately, fits on one page.

Still, Trump is ready to roll. Details, schmeetails. “With Irma and Harvey devastation, Tax Cuts and Tax Reform is needed more than ever before,” he tweeted. “Go Congress, go!” Negative thinkers pointed out that the hurricane devastation required federal spending, not revenue reduction. Also that “is needed” was grammatically — tragic.

Plus, again, the no-plan thing. “It’s really important for people to understand — the administration is urging Congress to vote fast on a proposal that doesn’t exist,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. The center made a rather heroic effort to figure out what the consequences would be if you cobbled a proposal out of all the tax stuff Trump has mentioned, and concluded it would add about $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

People keep calling Trump a deal-maker, but the truth is he doesn’t do deals. A “deal” means that two or more parties have agreed to terms for their mutual benefit, and that they all intend to abide by those terms. Trump has a long and well-known history of getting people to agree to his business plans by making promises he doesn’t keep and had no intention of keeping when he made them. Such an arrangement is not a “deal”; it is a “grift.”

9 thoughts on “Donald, Nancy and Chuck Hit a Wall”

  1. Ten days ago I commented here this –

    “I have a paranoid suspicion that Trump is going to compromise letting dreamers stay if democrats will vote to fund the wall. No evidence to support but…”

    Now there’s evidence. I have a paranoid suspicion today that there will be bipartisan agreement to extend DACA without funding the wall. Trump asked Congress to solve it through legislation. If he vetoes their solution, he owns the fallout. (Trump doesn’t want anything to be his fault.)

    Trump doesn’t expect Congress will pass anything. He plans to blame the GOP leadership in Congress and Trump thinks he has the leverage to change the complexion of Congress in the next election. Or Trump hopes Congress will see his displeasure as a serious threat and the legislative branch will voluntarily become an extension of the Oval Office.

    The lovefest between Trump and the democrats is intended to scare Ryan and McConnell. Trump wants the GOP leadership to fear that Trump will govern through the democrats if the republicans in Congress don’t obey.

    I don’t think Trump expects that funding for the wall can get a two-thirds vote in the Senate. The ploy is intended to put the GOP in the Capitol Dome under his thumb on the issue he cares about – cutting taxes for billionaires and eliminating the estate tax, I don’t think he gives a rat’s fuzzy behind about anything else.

  3. Pelosi and Schuma both need to have their heads examined. To think you could make a verbal agreement with a pathological liar who would screw his own mother in a deal if he thought he’d been had or bested. There is no truth in him, there is no decency in him, there is nothing that even remotely resembles honesty or integrity..His word is worth shit.
    As a matter of fact…He’s nothing more than a big bag of shit.
    Trump has no principles. He’s all about himself, and to think he cares about anything other than his own interests is a grave mistake. He’s the epitome of selfishness.
    It’s in the nature of the beast. Know that, and know that well.

    For all them Trumptards parading around with their MAGA hats I recommend that they look very closely at exactly what it is that constitutes America’s greatness so that they come to understand just how much they’ve been had/ used. They’ve been blinded by the bitterness and hatred that Trump exudes.
    Thanks for the therapy. I feel better already..3 days of being incommunicado can really build up the need to vent. Especially about that bag of shit in the oval office.
    He’s a fraud if ever there was one!

  4. Gee, it’s almost as if putting into the Presidency a blowhard con-man with zero political experience, and more Russian connections than Aeroflot, wasn’t a good idea after all.

  6. Just for the record…That isn’t a misspelling of Chuck Schumer’s last name in the post above. I intentionally spelled it that way because a “Schuma’ in the etymology of Indo-European language originally meant an ineffectual whiner who has an over exaggerated sense of self importance. It seemed apt considering the subject at hand.

  7. WB Swami. Was wondering if you were crushed under a tree.

    Agree completely that Shumer and Pelosi should not be surprised. Trump has always practiced business with the attitude that negotiations begin after the contract is signed. However, I’m not sure that the situation hurts their negotiating position. Trump is going to openly hold 800,000 people hostage for the wall.

    I dearly hope that Shumer, Pelosi, Ryan and McConnell sit down and work out DACA without the wall and make Trump declare and admit that he’s holding these young people hostage. Everyone in Congress could take the high moral ground by working out a compromise and tell Trump that his strategy of playing the republicans against the democrats and then cheating them both won’t work.

  9. Trump cannot be trusted period.
    Every time I hear about his deal making in Kazakhstan or Georgia or Moscow, the end of the story is the deal fell through. Probably because he is completely untrustworthy to do what he says. He makes deals where he sells his name and invests nothing. Sorta like how he does government policy. He wants a win and invests nothing: no policy no ideas no follow through. So he always blames someone else, declares bankruptcy and moves on to another show. He really thinks government is a show, a thin veneer. And he wants espn to fire someone because he can’t fire her himself. how funny. And you thought righties were tired of political correctness. guess not

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