I do not like Nancy Pelosi. I do not obsessively HATE her like Dennis Miller, but I am generally not impressed. I’m sure that someone who’s been an elected official for as long as she has must have some virtues and skills that are not readily apparent, but as a public figure, Pelosi is almost as dull as Chuck Schumer and that much more gaffe-prone than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unlike AOC, Pelosi isn’t so media-savvy and quick on the uptake that she will recognize and correct her gaffes as quickly as possible.
So I have to give Pelosi credit for her polite disinvitation of Viceroy Trump to the State of the Union speech scheduled for January 29, “given the security concerns” as long as the government is shut down and Secret Service people are not paid. This hits Trump where he lives. Not only is he deprived of (yet another) opportunity to make his case for the shutdown on TV, he is deprived of a traditional aspect of our increasingly imperial presidency. Now Trump won’t get to penguin-waddle up the aisle, get up to the speaker’s podium, and show all the TV cameras how big his hands are. Pelosi did give Trump the traditional option of presenting the speech in writing, which is an even bigger insult. Not that Trump, or any other president, is going to write his entire State of the Union speech, but now Stephen Miller is going to have to do the hard work of searching Trump’s tweets to come up with enough typos and unneeded capitalizations to make it look authentic.
Some Republicans, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (who seems to equate ‘libertarianism’ with ‘kissing Trump’s ass’) have suggested that Senate leader Mitch McConnell offer his chamber of Congress for the SOTU speech, but apparently he hasn’t considered that this would simply be inviting a mass Democratic boycott of the event, which Pelosi’s action effectively is.
Instead, Trump decided – about 24 hours after Nancy’s maneuver – to be clever and cite his own security concerns as a pretext for cancelling the military escort for the trip that Pelosi and other Representatives were scheduled to make to an Afghanistan war zone, apparently timing the decision after the Congressmen had already gotten on a bus to the airport. No doubt that impressed many of those moderate Democrats that Trump is trying to get on his side. It didn’t even seem to impress some of Trump’s usual defenders, like Senator Lindsay Graham (R.-S.C.) who opposed Pelosi’s manuever but said, “One sophomoric response does not deserve another”. And the fact that Trump was not terribly serious in his opposition to the use of military escort during a shutdown was confirmed when Melania Trump took a military flight to Trump Mar-a-Lago in Florida, after King Donnie’s royal proclamation.
Seriously, how DID this man sire five kids with such a teeny weenie?
Perhaps realizing that all of his posturing is getting him less than nothing in the polls, Trump spent some time between Wednesday and Friday conferring with Republicans and confidants including Jared Kushner (but not Democrats), Trump declared on Friday that there would be a “major announcement” about border security and the budget standoff on Saturday afternoon. This turned out to be a plan with several points: while still demanding $5.7 billion for a wall, Trump is offering a three-year extension of status for DACA recipients and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders with $800 million more to address humanitarian issues at the border (which Trump’s policies had exacerbated). The problem being that these concessions are of a temporary nature while the wall is intended to be permanent. More importantly, at this stage, Democrats have no reason to trust Trump (but then, neither would Republicans, if they weren’t so desperate). Specifically, when Pelosi and Schumer tried to shut down the government to protect DACA “dreamers”, and were at a disadvantage because they didn’t have a majority in either house of Congress, they’d offered Trump his wall with a $25 billion budget in exchange for offering Dreamers a path to citizenship. Trump, apparently at the last minute, went back on the deal. So now Trump is escalating his demands with less leverage to work with (because now Pelosi has a majority). So normally one would give the president some credit for moving toward common ground, but you can never assume good faith with Trump. And now, not only do the Democrats know this, they are in position to act on that knowledge. So the major announcement comes down to a big fat nothing. Just like Trump.
It’s amazing that our nominal president did even this much to negotiate, but it’s still of a piece with his generally lazy, grudging and half-assed approach to governance. It probably explains why he made his announcement on a Saturday, when there weren’t going to be that many national media folks covering it. Of course the other danger of staging your event on a non-news day is that not only are people going to be focused on other things, the media may end up focusing on something even more marginal.
In my case, when I woke up late on Saturday and checked social media, the buzz wasn’t about Trump’s pseudo-concession. Rather, most news articles were going on about another incident in Washington.
Friday afternoon, some teenagers (allegedly) from a Catholic school in Kentucky were attending a March for Life rally (which hadn’t gotten that much attention in the media) and confronted a group of tribal native protestors of the Indigenous Peoples March (which got even less media attention). Everyone was focused on a particular moment when social activist and Omaha elder Nathan Phillips walked up to the kids and got in a face-off with this one Andy Samberg lookalike. By Saturday it was the only thing anyone could talk about, including Trump’s “deal.”
Now, there are a lot of the usual suspects on conservative websites and YouTube claiming to present the “real” story, such as the fact that the kids (who were all wearing MAGA hats, and not that much Christian or pro-life gear) were being provoked by some left-wing extremists called the Black Hebrews. At one point this group noticed a black student with the “pro-life” group and taunted him saying “when you get old enough, they gonna steal your organs” and then telling him, “get out, nigga.” Phillips himself told reporters that his group noticed the confrontation, although blaming the mostly white kids for it, saying: “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.” At that point Phillips and his group walked up to the crowd and began chanting. At which point one of the Indians got in an animated but civil discussion with one of the whites there, telling him, “this is not your land.” Videos taken by the black protestors tend to confirm the position that Phillips intervened on their behalf, with one guy saying “he came to the rescue.” During the event some of the kids were jumping up and down in imitation of the Indian chant, which one YouTube apologist captioned as “kids clearly having fun & making light of a tense situation”.
And while other apologists bought into the narrative that the media were editing the presentation to make conservative Christians look bad, it again raises the point why these kids were almost all wearing “Make America Great Again” or “Trump 2020” hats instead of carrying Christian or pro-life signs. And if Rod Dreher thinks that Nathan Phillips “seeks out these opportunities for confrontation, and then (goes) to the media with them,” well again, this was a lot more publicity than either the Indigenous march or the March for Life had gotten up to this point, and the result reflected far more badly on the latter.
So that’s the other reason that Trump’s gesture of conciliation failed. Not only did it not attract enough attention with the limited emphasis he gave it, Trump’s fan club gave the media a more vivid example of what the movement is really about.
Ironically, this incident just proves that we really do need a strong immigration policy for this country. After all, the Omaha didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.
Something to consider as this country heads toward Martin Luther King Day, the only federal holiday that celebrates an individual who was not a member of the military, not an elected politician, and used his First Amendment rights to protest for change within the system.
If for no other reason, that makes King a better example for libertarians than Rand Paul.