President Trump waits on Tuesday outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington to greet Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)
Too bad we don’t have a dealmaker as president. “The government hasn’t shut down under [President] Trump because neither Democrats, nor Republicans, nor even the president, really wanted it to. At each juncture, they’ve seized on whatever short-term, face-saving option was available to them. But as Trump fumes, a shutdown looms, and the DACA deadline nears, a climactic confrontation seems harder and harder to avoid.”
Here’s the deal: How could he possibly be surprised? “The president of the United Steelworkers union says the group is ‘terribly disappointed’ with President Trump, who he says has done nothing to protect American jobs since taking office last January. In an interview with CNN, United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard said that American workers are in some ways worse off now than they were just a year ago.”
The Club for Growth’s dealings may undermine the GOP in the Wisconsin Senate primary race. “Since [Kevin] Nicholson won the Club’s endorsement, it has gone to great lengths not just to promote him, but to attack the rest of the field, raising eyebrows throughout Wisconsin’s political class. … So while the Club for Growth should be embarrassed for its inability to understand Wisconsin politics, it’s nothing compared to how its handiwork in Senate primaries has helped keep tax-and-spend liberal Democrats competitive once the fallout clears on the Republican side.”
It’s hard to make a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program when opponents don’t stick to facts. “The right-leaning Hispanic Leadership Fund is asking lawmakers to reject what it calls ‘false information and outright lies about Latino immigrants’ that were circulated by three groups advocating for lower immigration levels in the United States. Mario H. Lopez, who is president of the HLF, sent letters Tuesday to Reps. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., and Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asking them to ‘properly and thoroughly vet’ information from the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and Federation [for American] Immigration Reform.” These groups have a long, ugly record of anti-immigration propaganda.
He doesn’t deal in “truth” — just in winning his base’s acclaim. “Trump, a historically prolific liar, has managed to stir up doubt in case after case, but this has rendered him incapable of convincing people of the importance of his constructive accomplishments. . . . A pair of Republican senators took it upon themselves to cover for the president who made a racist comment and then brazenly lied about it to the American people. To do that, they used a misleading distinction between ‘shithole’ and ‘shithouse’— and then the president’s own staff blew up their spot.” And now they all look like liars.
Their deal with the Devil will haunt them for years. “It is them I am angry at: all the Republicans who should know better but who are normalizing our racist-in-chief. No policy achievements — not tax cuts, not judges, not even victories against ISIS — are worth this. Trump is eroding the very foundations of America as complicit Republicans pretend to see and hear no evil.” Just as we warned.
Cutting down on immigration is a raw deal for Trump’s aging base. “Without robust immigration, each American worker will need to support substantially more retirees in the future than workers do today. And that will greatly increase the pressure for either unsustainable tax increases or biting benefit reductions in the federal retirement programs that the older and blue-collar whites central to Trump’s support rely upon so heavily. … With his systematic offensive against immigration, Trump is feeding the prejudices of some of his supporters — while threatening their ability to keep food on the table when they retire.” Read the whole thing.