Trump Decides to Own the Shutdown
This was yesterday's headline by Daviud Dayen at the far-left American Prospect , and it promoted the legacy stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic: In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise. . . But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways. Hmm, how could someone like that be elected dogcatcher, much less win two presidential elections? The answer is that the conventional wisdom seriously underestimates ...