As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi continues to outmaneuver a visibly exhausted and word-slurring President Trump, the president has resorted to juvenile tactics in retaliation. Now, even one of his most reliable sycophants, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), is calling the president’s punitive actions against Speaker Pelosi inappropriate.
Yesterday, Pelosi suggested to Trump that he postpone his planned State of The Union address before a joint session of Congress until after the government shutdown crisis is resolved, knowing full well that the president was planning to read a Stephen Miller-penned speech attacking the Democrats for ignoring his imaginary national emergency at the border and blaming them for the shutdown for which he once claimed proud ownership.
Pelosi suggested that Trump broadcast his speech from the Oval Office if he didn’t want to postpone it, all but formally rescinding the required invitation from the House Speaker to address Congress in the House chambers, in a move that Republicans condemned as a political attack.
Democrats — aware that until Woodrow Wilson took office, prior presidents had submitted their State of the Union messages in writing to Congress — saw Pelosi’s insistence on reopening the government before allowing Trump the privilege of addressing the nation from her home turf as a tough reassertion of the legislative branch as a co-equal governing body to the executive branch.
The President retaliated for Pelosi’s unprecedented maneuver by publicly announcing on Twitter that he would not allow the Speaker and a delegation of Congressional Democrats to use military aircraft to make a planned trip to visit Afghanistan for a classified briefing from commanders of the war effort there. Instead, he suggested that the Democrats and their senior leader could take commercial flights to the war zone, a possibility that he undermined by leaking the details of their trip in a feckless breach of security protocols.
Senator Graham — who has reversed his early skepticism of Trump (whom he called “a jackass” during his campaign) and become one of the President’s most toadying allies in the Senate — first predictably criticized the Democratic Speaker for “playing politics with the State of the Union” while applauding her desire to “meet our troops and hear from our commanders and allies.”
It was Graham’s reaction to the president’s retaliatory action against Speaker Pelosi, however, that drew the most attention from the public.
President Trump denying Speaker Pelosi military travel to visit our troops in Afghanistan, our allies in Egypt and NATO is also inappropriate.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 17, 2019
I wish our political leadership could find the same desire to work for common goals as those who serve our nation in uniform and other capacities.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 17, 2019
Given that Graham’s Senate colleague, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has been the primary obstacle to reopening the shuttered government due to his refusal to allow another vote on the same funding bills the Senate had already passed in the previous Congress, perhaps he should forward his tweet to McConnel via direct message.
Senator Graham’s labeling of any of Trump’s actions as “inappropriate” is about as informative as labeling Snoop Dog as a stoner, so obvious a personal characteristic that it no longer bears repeating.
Perhaps a better descriptor would have been “hypocritical,” given that Trump is letting his Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin use the same military resources to travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos to mingle with wealthy oligarchs and also letting his wife Melania use an Air Force flight to visit his Mar-a-Lago resort today.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
