Drones. High tech devices at ports of entry, surveillance, the wall of high tech. That’s what he intended all along, he was just maneuvering the Dems into a position where they had to accept it. I mean, really, a two thousand mile wall? Ridiculous, can’t happen. His supporters knew that, they were in on the ruse, and helped con the Dems into supporting the real wall. And after all those furloughed workers came out to support him, they caved.
Trump had a confrontation with the Democrats - and he lost. While he may never admit it in public, he knows it. You don’t have the kind of insecurity Trump has without having experienced the feeling of being humiliated.
There’s no way that he’s going to want to rip the bandaid off of his barely-begun-to-heal ego and go through this experience all over again three weeks from now.
He’s like an athlete with an injury. He’ll want to get back in action before he’s fully healed to prove he can still perform.
That may be the only sense in which he is like an athlete, but okay.
We are only just starting to feel the affects of the shutdown. Not only is there no support for another shutdown I think the majority of Republicans are distancing themselves permanently from Donald.
Something will get passed, and Trump will declare it a victory that only happened because of his brave willingness to shut the gov’t down. He’ll say this even if what gets passed is identical to whatever was on the table before the shutdown.
here is no need for reality to intrude on Trump’s posturing, or his fans’ mindless adulation.
I predict that there will be a negotiated settlement where the Dems agree to a few billion dollars in border security funding that is to be spent based on the recommendations of a panel of experts, and which may include barriers, and that Trump uses this to claim victory.
It’s to the advantage of the Dems to look tough on border security by giving it more money, while staying tough on no Wall. Most people don’t want a wall. Even more people near the border don’t want a wall.
I don’t know what Trump will think or say, but his base will know he lost.
This is very silly. Trump’s approval rating is really really low, but his approval rating by Republican voters is still rock solid. They’re going to keep approving of him no matter what, because approving of the Republican President is what you do when you’re a Republican voter.
I agree, some nice amount for “Border security”, but the Dems already Oked that some time ago.
Whoa! :eek: Are you suggesting he had a plan to begin with? 
I’ve been calling my Congresscritter to suggest that the Dems tack Trump’s $5.7B onto H.R. 1, the Dems’ big voting-rights bill.
It’s fairly low, as presidential approval ratings go, and at the moment, it’s a bit lower than it had been over 2018, but it really hasn’t moved much in the past year-plus.
FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated approval score for him is currently at 39.4%, which is as low as it’s been since very early in 2018, but it really hasn’t moved around very much. For the past year, it’s stayed in a very small range of 39-43%. The chart does show that his disapproval rating has spiked in recent weeks, and it’s now at 56%, but it all shows that, for the most part, people’s opinions of Trump (good or bad) are pretty well entrenched now.
Too late to edit: link to the FiveThirtyEight approval ratings.
Also, that page has a comparison of Trump’s approval ratings to those of other U.S. presidents, going back to JFK. The only president in that group whose approval rating was comparably low to Trump’s, at this point in his presidency (two years in), was Reagan. It should be noted that, in Reagan’s case, the U.S. was in a deep recession (and had been for pretty much all of his presidency to that date), and the U.S. unemployment rate in December '82 (i.e., comparable to December '18, relative to Trump’s term) was 10.8%.
I am strongly sympathetic to this point of view… however, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are painting him as weak and ineffectual because he stopped smashing his head against the rocks of reality. This kind of friendly fire from the right flank is the most serious threat to his approval, not to mention the dumb things it goads him into doing.
Trump now knows he can’t get the wall funding through a gov’t shutdown and (among other reasons) the toll on his poll ratings should be enough to dissuade him from taking that route again. That would seem to leave him with two options:
Agree to a more or less bipartisan plan to increase border security sans wall funding. He could try to spin this as a victory, but he will be savaged by the extreme right, his hardest core supporters.
Or he could go the national emergency route.
I agree it will not be supported by all republicans, but I think Trump will figure they are too chicken shit to try and stop him. And if they do try to stop him and succeed, they are obvious scapegoats. I think it will end up in the courts. Trump will claim he will prevail (and even better for him, he doesn’t have to pay legal fees). If it doesn’t prevail in the courts, he once again has ready made scapegoats in the judges. Assuming it drags on and on in the courts, he will have effectively escaped his no-win position.
He doesn’t play well with others and he doesn’t take advice, especially sensible advice. He likes to be in all the headlines in all the media in the whole world as long as and as much as possible, so his large, gross, misshapen gut may tell him that his best course is:
I wouldn’t mind it in that case. or if they tacked wall funding into a medicare expansion bill.
I think what’s hurt Trump in particular over this was his often repeated claim that he’s a master at deal-making. Whenever people warned about possible problems, he would just say that he would personally take charge and use his negotiating skills to make it work.
And he just failed. He couldn’t get a deal made on one of the key issues of his presidency. From now on whenever he tries to claim he’s a deal-maker, this will get thrown back in his face.
I have mentioned this before, I wonder … if he were to have an outright confrontation with those influencers, if he were to get on the rally stage and say “Little Annie and Limburger have never had to run the kind of business or government I run, you know? I have had to deal with tremendous negotiations in the billions, with top companies and world powers, what have they done? They wouldn’t have lasted a week, Nancy would have flattened them both before New Year’s. Believe me.” … who would “the base” stand with?