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Denial, as the punny saying goes, is not just a river in Egypt. President Donald Trump seems to still be floating down De Nile, however, oblivious to the world of reality around him. This isn't exactly a crisis yet, but it certainly will become a lot more noticeable as time goes by.
President Donald Trump's government shutdown became only the second-biggest media story this morning, after the news broke of an early-morning raid that wound up with the arrest of Roger Stone on charges of obstruction and witness-tampering. Bob Mueller's investigation just caught another witch, in other words. Trump, of course, can't stand to see (1) news about Mueller, and (2) any television news story that isn't all about him, so he immediately decided to make even bigger news, by caving completely on the shutdown and handing Nancy Pelosi exactly what she's been demanding all along.
A scant few months ago, the topic du jour at the Washington cocktail parties was whether Nancy Pelosi would even become the next speaker of the House. Maybe a revolt-from-within would take her down. She was seen as (pick one): too old, too weak to fight Trump effectively, too centrist, or too squishy when the going got tough. These arguments now seem laughable, but an outsized amount of attention was paid to them in the punditocracy, and not all that long ago. Is anyone now still wondering whether Pelosi can effectively take on Trump, or whether her age precludes her from being an effective Democratic leader?
That headline is a little acronym-heavy, so allow me to spell it out: the President Of The United States is locked in a battle of wills with the Speaker Of The House over the State Of The Union speech. How this all ends is anyone's guess, since it is nothing more than a side drama in the grand government-shutdown Kabuki theater we're all now trapped within. So far, it looks like Nancy Pelosi has the upper hand in the standoff, but you never really know what Donald Trump is going to do next, so it's anyone's guess precisely what is going to happen next Tuesday night.
Democratic presidential hopefuls (both announced and not-yet-announced) are already beginning to define their candidacies in their speeches. The field is going to be so large this time around that they'll all be searching for ways to stand out from the pack. Many basic Democratic agenda items will be very similar from candidate to candidate, making nuanced differences all that separates them. Two of these candidates -- one announced, one not -- took the occasion of Martin Luther King Junior Day yesterday to explicitly call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. This is a much more potent political issue than most folks who reside inside the Beltway realize, and it may just become a dealbreaker issue for the presidential field.
The government shutdown hits the one-month milestone this weekend, but there's an even more significant calendar event which will happen as well: Donald Trump hits the halfway point of his term in office. Or, to take into account all the possibilities, we'd have to say "at least the halfway point," since if he doesn't serve his whole term for one reason or another (for, you know, whatever reason...) then he'd have hit his halfway point already, at some point in the past. So please read that headline as a worst-case scenario. We're only halfway through this rollercoaster ride, folks.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is trolling President Donald Trump. She just sent him a letter (which she then immediately released to the public, for maximum impact) suggesting that the upcoming State Of The Union speech be either: postponed until the government is open once again, given from the Oval Office on television, or just written down by the White House and sent over to Congress. This is obviously designed to do nothing short of getting under the president's skin, but at the same time it is indeed a real threat, since Pelosi actually does have the power to deny Trump the chance to give his annual speech. Officially, the speaker invites the president and then somewhat later (often mere days before the speech) the House and Senate pass an official invitation which schedules the event. Pelosi has already informally invited Trump to speak on January 29th, but Congress has not yet officially acted. If Pelosi doesn't allow a floor vote, then the official invitation will never happen and the speech will essentially be cancelled. Such is the power of having the majority in the House.
If our president is going crazy over a non-existent "emergency" at our southern border, could it be called "borderline insanity"? We're just asking....
President Donald Trump held a meeting today with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It was as pointless as the last few meetings between the three, from all accounts. Reportedly, after Pelosi made her case for opening the government but only extending the budget for the Department of Homeland Security for another month -- to give both sides time to have the border wall fight without penalizing all the federal workers -- Trump asked her point-blank whether she would agree to his wall money in 30 days or not. She said "No," and Trump got up and walked out of the meeting. Which is why the word "pointless" is hard to avoid.
President Trump just got done delivering the first primetime Oval Office speech of his presidency, which was followed by a rebuttal from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The entire experience was an odd one, mostly for the brevity of both speeches, which were planned to be eight minutes each (I did not time them, but they both seemed to fall in that ballpark). So my snap reactions will likewise be abbreviated, meaning this column won't be anywhere near as long as the ones I write after State Of The Union speeches (for instance).