Trump caved, Trump caved, Trump caved. That’s the incantation, and if you repeat it long enough, the words begin to feel right. The president’s capitulation was ‘total’, say the media heads. He has been ‘humiliated.’ Nancy Pelosi ‘took him to the cleaners’ and ‘kicked his behind.’ This, apparently, qualifies as high-level political analysis.
The trouble is, it isn’t true. Trump didn’t cave. He backed off. He may have folded, temporarily, but what journalists and many Democrats struggle to understand is that elections are not won and lost in news cycles. The irony is that many of Trump’s opponents accuse him of having ADD, of being a Twitter addict who watches too much 24-hour rolling news. But they all seem far too eager to say that his presidency is sunk based on one day of apparently bad headlines.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, they say. There was never any ‘strategy’ for winning the shutdown, the White House insiders tell us. But guess what? There never has been any ‘strategy’ behind Trump’s politics, yet he still became the most powerful man in the world. His presidency, like his candidacy, is improvisational and instinctive. He just riffs and talks about deals. The funny part is that it doesn’t work all that badly, at least not as terribly as politics-as-usual on the Hill.
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