How the Battle of the Border Wall Will End
During a recent on-camera rant, President Trump offered that he probably “would have been a pretty good general.” The line was received by most sentient Americans with an eye roll of frustration and whatever happens to disbelief once it ripens and busts in the direct sunlight of persistent, unrelenting, public stupidity. The temptation is to just let that ridiculous sentiment pass along with so many other quotidian idiocies from the Tangerine Tyrant, but I’d like to pause just a moment and savor how wrong this particular notion truly is. We’re only now getting the opportunity to see this President as he comes into contact with an actual, skilled tactician as a domestic opponent. How poorly he is prepared in the current battle will give us a glimpse of what’s to come over the balance of his first term.
Spoiler alert: It’s going to be hilarious.
While we can thank the many gods that our nation hasn’t yet ended up in a geopolitical conflict that would require Donnie Bonespurs to clip on his shoulder stars, early 2019 has provided a new test of his leadership in the form of Nancy Pelosi. Only a few days into her tenure as House Speaker, it is becoming painfully clear just how poorly Trump handles confrontations on a meaningful battlefield against a skilled opponent. I’m speaking, of course, about the government shutdown over border-wall funding.
You’d be forgiven for not seeing how badly Trump is playing his hand if you’ve been watching the national news. Major media outlets are still covering this whole fiasco as a “Showdown in Washington.” They are treating it as if we were spectators to a long-awaited prize fight wherein the outcome were somehow unknowable. But there ain’t no mystery about how this will end. If you actually note how the opposing forces are arrayed, it’s clear that President Trump has left an embarrassingly obvious gap in his defenses through which the Speaker will relentlessly charge.
Speaker Pelosi is as skilled a strategic thinker as the Capitol Building has seen in decades, arguably centuries. There’s not a chance in hell that she’s missed his blunder. If he doesn’t fold before it becomes apparent even to the dunderheads at CNN, she’ll use it to break him publicly. His best bet, regardless of how painful it will be for him, is to abandon the field immediately. A few days ago, Senator Lindsey Graham said that if Trump folds on the wall it will be “the end of his Presidency.”
He’s right about that. Folding in this battle will collapse Trump’s support on the right and reveal him as the woefully unprepared rump of a hominid that he truly is. Still, it’s his best shot.
If Trump truly was “a pretty good general” or even a “not frigging terrible general,” then he would have had the foresight to secure an appropriations package through a Republican-controlled Congress in late 2018, that guaranteed a funded payroll for Border Patrol and ICE officers throughout 2019. Truly, for someone who knew what they were doing heading into this battle, that should have been a complete no-brainer. It could have been a quiet rider on one of the many continuing resolutions that funded the 75% of the government that isn’t shut down as we enter the New Year. To not take this obvious step was to order the President’s best troops into no-man’s land against machine-gun nests of well-arrayed, merciless economic realities.
Trump, of course, didn’t think this through. He didn’t, because he’s a transactional, single-focus, I’m-the-only-one-who-matters fool. He is, writ short, the exact opposite of a “pretty good general,” someone whose entire job description is based around considering the big picture.
He didn’t make sure his best troops were equipped for battle because he doesn’t understand Washington and a pliant Republican Congress has allowed that ignorance to fester for two years. He didn’t do it because he hired a sack of fools from the Fox News gift shop to staff his Administration, figuring they’d be good enough for government work — which, of course, they aren’t.
He didn’t do it, at the end of all this, because he’s an idiot. Full stop.
Though the government shutdown began in late December, its impact on furloughed government workers will only begin to be felt this week. It’s with this first pay-period in 2019, that the families of 800,000 federal workers will face the challenges of trying to live in America without an income for what the President said could be “months, or even years.”
Seriously??? 800,000 families without an income for years???
Now, to be honest, Donald Trump couldn’t give a damn about the grand majority of them. He’s already noted that “most furloughed workers are Democrats,” and crass as that might be, he’s probably right. But where he’s gravely miscalculated the politics is with another subset of affected workers who HAVEN’T been furloughed, but ARE being required to work without pay.
Those are workers deemed “essential” to government operations, and they include all uniformed federal officers.
Amongst those uniformed federal officers that are currently WORKING WITHOUT PAY are the entire force of both the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Those officers — through their unions — have been lock, stock, and barrel behind the President since the campaign. They have literally been his most ardent supporters, particularly when it has come to issues like building the wall. And now, because he’s a damn fool, he’ll be relying upon them to hold the line both politically AND literally, “for months or even years” without pay.
Honestly, how long can that last?
How long will it be until ICE and BP agents start to protest vocally or in job actions like coordinated sick-day calls? How long will it be before MSNBC and CNN start doing stories about missed mortgage payment for the men and women of the Border Patrol? How long before stories about missed daycare-center payments? Missed car payments? Skipped medical procedures? Preventable deaths? How long will it be before Trump faces withering criticism from the men and women who are sworn to defend the border? Who have been with him since the beginning? Who probably — as a group — want the wall more than just about anything?
Just not more than feeding their kids.
This all could end before that happens. Perhaps there will be a negotiated settlement wherein the Democrats decide that a wounded President who gives big on DACA or infrastructure or something else is worth more than a lame duck with bad hair. But if this plays out, there’s only own ending.
The President — a terrible, terrible general — doesn’t see any of this yet. He doesn’t see that once the Border Patrol abandons him on building the wall, all his other support will fall away and leave him standing in the middle a a field, all alone. He just doesn’t know what will come to pass. Not yet.
But you know who does?
Nancy “Four-Star” Pelosi.
Bank on it.
