Trump supporters have already drank his kool-aid. Truth won’t sway them. Lies won’t sway them. They will follow their Beloved Leader until the end.
So if Democrats tried to appeal to Trump voters by being as stupid as Trump, they’d fail. And they’d lose all of the voters who support the Democrats because they’re not as stupid as Trump.
In a Machiavellian sense the border wall/budget issue is a great stroke of luck for the Dems at this time. The last thing they should ever do is capitulate. The election just showed that the public opinion is against Trump and the Pubs. And the divisiveness is a long term winner for the Dems. Every month more and more Independents see the absurdity of anyone supporting Trump’s asinine “policy”, and decide they will never support an R again.
Either Trump will cave now, or it will be a pissing contest till January, and the CR will pass House and Senate , and override his veto. He will have impotently stomped his foot for a month for nothing at all, and put another nail in his own coffin.
According to 538, Trump’s disapproval rating is sharply up to 53.3 in the past couple weeks and approval rating is down to 41.4. Looks like a win for the Dems to oppose the wall.
They should propose a law to arrest the heads of companies that hire illegal workers and bundle it with the wall funding.
Has nobody mentioned the views of the White House Chief of Staff on his boss’s Wall?
I really don’t know what else can be said about the border wall that hasn’t already been said. Except for Trump’s hardcore faithful, a majority of people understand that building a wall isn’t necessarily the answer.
The Democrats should be pointing out that the shutdown, from their perspective, has as much to do with Donald Trump’s bad faith in negotiations. He blatantly lied to Schumer and Pelosi when he said he’d take blame for the shutdown. He blatantly lied to members of his own party when he said he’d sign a temporary stopgap (it’s not like he was agreeing to a permanent solution). Outgoing Senator Bob Corker already said it: this is Trump trying to look like a fighter.
Obviously Dems don’t want shutdowns and they don’t want workers going unpaid, but this is on Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency and no one else. I’d be disappointed if Dems were to cave in to Trump’s demands. If the shutdown lasts long enough, the economy will probably start to suffer - already has in the markets. Maybe that’s what needs to happen for some of Trump’s holdouts to start getting the picture. Not that his true base ever will, but perhaps some of the right-leaning independents will finally demand that honesty prevail over political thuggery.
And if Dems cave and agree to less than $5B, master negotiator will probably reverse himself and demand $5B, and thus we’re back in the same spot. Master negotiator can’t be trusted - that’s the issue.
Master negotiator’s capriciousness and lack of integrity isn’t just a political issue anymore; it’s becoming an economic issue, as markets are increasingly worried about this presidency - and with good reason. Markets often worry about the rationality of the markets. It’s their faith in institutions that ultimately give investors and consumers a sense of calm. In 2018, markets are worried that this president is going to fatally undermine faith in the market - again, with good reason.
DJT doesn’t care what’s good for the country.
He just likes to thumb his nose at the Dems.
But even phrasing it like that is problematic. The answer to what? It accepts that there is a significant unaddressed immigrant problem that requires a new answer, which the vast majority of Americans do not understand there really is not.
A big question for the Democratic side is whether to debate that narrative (a debate which has the facts on their side but which they will still likely lose and which will rally his supporters more than anything) or to frame the discussion on what is the best answer to the (not particularly real) problem (not The Big Beautiful Wall).
Which is better for the Democratic side to do?
You seem to have a bit of a disconnect here. The America-hating fuckstick’s supporters are unreachable, regardless of the avenue of appeal. Best that they be written off as a lost cause, and then have the shit marginalized out of them so that they become as negligible a factor as they should have been from the beginning.
At this stage of the game, I don’t think it’s politically savvy to try to make the case that, not only don’t we need a wall, we don’t even need to treat the immigration issue as a problem. (Even if it happens to be true.) The issue has been on the front burner so long that arguing it’s not really an issue will seem Pollyanna-ish.
Best to frame the discussion along the lines of “better border security approaches than a wall” and, one would hope, advancing that discussion toward a more humane, sensible approach to immigration once we have a non-insane president.
I think hitting the issue at its root is the best way to fight the wall.
So long as immigration is seen, without real facts, as an ongoing problem, then solutions that can’t work in fact can be seen as solutions.
But when we can say that immigration rates have stabilized to something we can tolerate indefinitely, then we can stop panicking. Then the argument that the wall makes little difference can perhaps be heard.
But I think the real problem is folks misunderstanding Jack Nicholson’s speech in A Few Good Men. He was supposed to be full of crap; a lot of viewers didn’t get that, so they went to build up and maintain his imagined “world with walls.”
Right - no problem here.
Do you have any facts available as to how he or his associates came to be in the country? Or are you just fearmongering hoping people will ignore the actual issue and assume a wall would have made a difference?
The U.S.A. has Millions of criminals, and many Millions of immigrants.
And one of the immigrants committed a crime? :eek: :smack: Stop the presses!! This defies all laws of probability!
“Cherry picking” is a form of logical fallacy in argumentation where an exceptional example is selected because the facts in aggregate do not support a position. Thank you for providing the class with a prime example of this type of fallacy.
Stranger
46 other officers were shot and killed in the line of duty this year. Why are their deaths of no importance??
Immigrants cause fewer crimes than born-Americans, including illegal immigrants (if we ignore the “illegal entry/overstay of visa” crime that 100% of them have committed).
From that illustrious lefty publication, the Cato Institute:
Besides, being in the US illegally is a misdemeanor, not a felony, so people shouldn’t act like it’s the crime of the century.
I will say, there are three major points that should be brought up by the Democrats, none of which I have heard:
Trump employs illegal immigrants, so it’s no big surprise that he’d rather build a bridge to nowhere, in terms of stopping illegal immigration, rather than working on legislation like e-verify. He clearly has no genuine interest in stopping illegal immigration, beyond making it sound like he does.
For further proof on that, one can compare how much immigration dropped, as a percentage, under Obama versus under Trump. Under Obama, it was reduced by 2/3rds. Under Trump, it has remained constant.
Trump is a famously corrupt property developer with ties to the mafia and a habit of creating sham companies to funnel money into, during large construction efforts. So, again, given that we all know that the wall is not liable to be effective in any particular way against illegal immigration, we have to ask why the man wants it so much?
So whether the Democrats are so far winning, they’re really failing to do the best that they can in the fight.