With the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, President Trump is now forced to face the reality of constraints on his presidential powers as the Constitution intended.
For Trump this new reality manifests itself through one person — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has made it clear that the mandate Democrats received from voters in the midterm who rejected the Republican agenda prohibits the misallocation of taxpayer dollars to the president’s ridiculously primitive and ineffective proposed panacea to border security, his precious wall.
Trump’s obstinate refusal to reject the will of the American people and his new obsession with Speaker Pelosi as the totem of the opposition to his unbridled desire to subvert the basic Constitutional principles our nation was founded upon led to a series of early morning tweets from the president attacking the Democratic leader today.
Nancy Pelosi and some of the Democrats turned down my offer yesterday before I even got up to speak. They don’t see crime & drugs, they only see 2020 – which they are not going to win. Best economy! They should do the right thing for the Country & allow people to go back to work.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2019
Trump inexplicably blames Pelosi for his decision to appear on TV and make an offer he had already been told was unacceptable. As Trump destroys the economy by refusing to reopen the government without getting his authoritarian way, he brags about how the “Best economy!” — one whose rise was merely a continuation of President Obama’s recovery after the last Republican economic debacle — will lead to a Republican victory in 2020.
He conveniently ignores the fact that House Democrats have already passed legislation that reopens the government, legislation that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has refused to bring to a vote because Trump has vowed to veto it. Instead of playing this type of game, Trump “should do the right thing for the Country & allow people to go back to work.”
No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer. It is a 3 year extension of DACA. Amnesty will be used only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else. Likewise there will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here illegally-but be careful Nancy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2019
Since Trump’s proposal to hold DACA recipients hostage for his border wall funding was as poorly received by his bigoted base as it was by Democrats, his next tweet was aimed at mollifying his right-wing supporters who criticized his new proposal as a betrayal of their white nationalist ideology.
He subverts his own objective and undermines the usefulness of this already rejected proposal as a bargaining chip by warning Pelosi that his temporary acceptance of the Dreamers could all be reversed at his whim.
Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat. She is so petrified of the “lefties” in her party that she has lost control…And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2019
“I’m not the crazy one! You are! And your mother’s ugly, too!” the president may as well be saying in this hypocritical, politically motivated tweet by a man bullied by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other unelected right-wing mouthpieces into rejecting the already passed Senate legislation that would have prevented the shutdown.
Nancy, I am still thinking about the State of the Union speech, there are so many options – including doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance. While a contract is a contract, I’ll get back to you soon!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2019
Someone apparently has never taught the President how to use Twitter’s direct message function since this barely comprehensible tweet personally addressed to Speaker Pelosi was sent out for everyone to see.
It’s uncertain what Trump is attempting to do here. Pelosi’s initial letter to Trump suggested postponing the State of The Union until after the shutdown is over, but didn’t officially withdraw the invitation to address a joint session of Congress.
Trump petulantly responded by refusing to allow Pelosi the use of a military aircraft to visit NATO allies and Armed Forces commanders in Afghanistan and then took the unprecedented step of revealing her travel plans on commercial flights jeopardizing the operational security of the Speaker’s trip which she subsequently had to cancel as a result.
No written acceptance of Pelosi’s offer to postpone the State of The Union address has been made public, so Trump’s perplexing remarks about “a contract is a contract” defy explanation, except to note that in the operation of his businesses, contracts to pay his vendors for the work that they performed mattered little to the deadbeat real estate developer known for stiffing contractors after the work they had done had already been performed.
If only Trump would put the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of federal workers suffering because of his government shutdown ahead of his own ego and obsession with not being outmaneuvered by a strong female Democratic leader, our nation wouldn’t be in the precarious position it remains in as the government shutdown stretches into its second month.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.