A week after a contentious White House meeting in which he pledged to push for a government shutdown unless he got funding for his proposed border wall, President Donald Trump appears ready to concede the fight and sign-off on a short-term budget fix.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin is not surprised. In a new column, she says Trump "always folds" in these situations.
"Until he became president, Donald Trump operated on bravado, exaggeration and snookering the unwary with products of inferior quality," she writes. "If he failed, he moved on or declared victory, continuing to inflate his net worth. Whatever he said literally did not matter. It was all a show, with Trump as the lead carnival barker."
That formula does not work now that he's president, Rubin writes, because people pay close attention to his lack of results.
On the failed shut-down threat, Trump looks ineffective and weak, she says.
"There is no spinning this humiliating defeat," Rubin writes. "The short-term spending bill will take us into the new Congress, when the Democratic House will certainly not give him his cockamamie wall no matter how 'artistically designed' it is... Speaker-to-be Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) knows full well she will be able to call Trump’s bluff, over and over again."
Read the full column here.
