Donald Trump and his conservative buddies may THINK they are ok in holding up 800,000 government employee’s pay and 25% of governments business for a Great Border Wall…..
But?
Every hour?
They are shooting THEMSELVES in the political foot for something they KNOW isn’t gonna happen….
Donald Trump is NOT the American President…
He is just about his minority GOP base….
……with immigration front and center late last year, the GOP suffered its worst midterm House loss since Watergate. They lost the popular vote by nine points. Democrats gained seven governorships. While Republicans did pick up two Senate seats, they also saw seats flip to Democrats in two Southwestern states (Nevada and Arizona) and got at least a scare in a third (Texas.)
And one of the rare bright spots for the House GOP was that Will Hurd, an endangered Texas Republican representing a district that spans a full third of the U.S.-Mexico border, narrowly survived a challenge from a Democrat after being one of the few in his party to vocally oppose Trump’s immigration positions.
Add to that the fact that a majority of Americans — 54 percent — oppose building the wall, per Quinnipiac, with 86 percent of Republicans but just 45 percent of independents and eight percent of Democrats backing the idea. And there’s evidence that, even among Republicans, those who live closer to the border are less likely to support the wall than those who live further away.
So Trump is staking all the political and economic consequences of a lengthy shutdown on an immigration play that hasn’t been shown to be a political winner outside of his own base.
As one of us pointed out this weekend, for Trump, doubling down on the wall isn’t just about keeping undocumented immigrants OUT anymore. It’s also about keeping his hard-core supporters IN. Why? The base is the difference between a 42 percent approval rating and a 35 percent approval rating….
Edward Luce: “Politics isn’t usually this simple. But Donald Trump lives and dies by marketing slogans. In this case — ‘Build the wall!’ — the outcome is near certain defeat. It’s all the more remarkable for being self-created. The fact that he only started to care about redeeming his promise after Democrats regained the House in the midterms, makes it even more self-destructive. He had two years of Republican control to push it through and failed. It’s hard to see Democrats striking almost any deal to fund a wall they revile and that even anti-immigrant hardliners concede would do little to fix America’s immigration problems… As a result, Trump is hurtling with great steam into an entirely needless train wreck.”
“The question is why he is only now becoming serious when he has the least chance of succeeding. The charitable answer is that he didn’t see the midterm election defeat coming. He tried to win that election by hyping up a crisis about an invasion of central American migrants. It backfired. This is his last chance to fund a wall. The uncharitable answer, which I think is the right one, is that Trump’s politics only works in a climate of permanent frenzy. A government shutdown meets that test.”…..
Note….
Trump approval average in Real Clear Politics has been dropping …..
That began as soon as the shutdown began….