He can’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag
by digby
Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker breaks down Trump’s backtrack on the border wall and concludes with this:
From a policy perspective, Trump’s reversal is welcome. There is no credible evidence that a twenty-two-hundred-mile physical wall is the best use of federal funds to deter unauthorized border crossings—never mind the message that a giant wall would send to the rest of the world. The members of Congress who know the issue the best think it’s a bad idea. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the southwest border said they support President Donald Trump’s request for $1.4 billion to begin construction of his promised wall.” And if Trump’s retreat from insisting on wall money helps keep the government open, he should be applauded for being flexible.
But, from a political perspective, Trump has given members of Congress another reason not to trust his word. He promised a health-care bill that would cover everyone, settled for one that would have kicked twenty-four million people off insurance, and then watched helplessly as the bill floundered. He promised a trillion-dollar infrastructure package that hasn’t materialized. And now the wall, Trump’s signature proposal on the campaign, has been shelved. This last point risks angering even Trump’s base supporters—Rush Limbaugh declared that he was “very, very troubled” by the news.
There are lots of reasons for Trump’s lack of legislative victories so far. His White House is ideologically divided, as are Republicans in Congress. Democrats have uniformly opposed his initiatives and Trump has done nothing to try to woo them, even though he will need at least some Democratic votes in the Senate to pass any meaningful measures.
But the biggest problem is Trump himself. The man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” is a terrible negotiator.
If nothing else has become obvious in the past three months, everyone should at least have been schooled about this particular bragging point. His endless self-promotion as the world’s greatest negotiator was one hundred percent prime grade bullshit. When he gets involved he actually destroys whatever chances there were for a deal. And that’s a blessing since every one of his promises, as well as Paul Ryan’s, are daft. If they can keep him away from existing agreements with foreign countries we might come out of this alive.
Take a few minutes to watch this nonsense from the campaign trail on his powers of negotiation and ask yourself why anyone ever believed it:
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