ALL IN ALL, IT'S JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Thomas Paine wrote that in 1776, in a series of essays collected as The American Crisis. Paine knew an emergency when he saw one. His next sentence presciently described the role of the Republican Party in the 21st century: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”
1776 was a little before my time, but I was alive in 1952, although I’ll admit I wasn’t paying much attention to politics at the time. My excuse is that I was only five years old. I’ve been trying to make up for lost time ever since. But I digress.
In 1952, Harry Truman had decided not to run for re-election, and the war in Korea was looking iffy because China had entered the fray on the side of the North Koreans. By the spring of 1952, the war was a miserable stalemate. That was when the United Steelworkers Union called a nationwide strike. They were demanding 26 cents an hour! Not an increase of 26 cents an hour, but a basic wage of 26 cents an hour, or a little over $10 per week. That’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez territory, folks. Socialism! Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile. No wonder the steel company bosses told the union to take a hike.
Nevertheless, the idea that the war effort needed an uninterrupted supply of steel for tanks, airplanes, and other military supplies, wasn’t crazy. Truman saw this as a genuine emergency, and tried to nationalize the steel industry. By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court rejected Truman’s position. William O. Douglas noted that there was indeed a crisis, but that it was Congress’ job, not the President’s, to fix it. Truman wasn’t happy with the decision, but as he told reporters at a press conference, “I have no ambition to be a dictator. He obeyed the Supreme Court’s decision.
Let us now fast forward to 2019. I’m an old man now, and I’m paying an unhealthy amount of attention to politics. And wouldn’t you know it, we have another national emergency on our hands. His name is Donald Trump. And now the man who is a walking national emergency has declared a bogus national emergency. How bogus? So bogus that even Ann Coulter, for crying out loud, tweeted “Look, the only national emergency is that our president is an idiot." Yes, hell just froze over.
And the cream of the jest is that Trump couldn’t resist proving Coulter’s point. He jerked the rug out from under himself, deflating any sense of urgency by acknowledging that, “I didn’t need to do this.” That might have been the only true thing he said in the entire speech.
Credit where credit is due, though. Trump seems to have invented a brand-new kind of national emergency – a crisis that isn’t really critical, the classic solution in search of a problem. And the problem is Donald Trump’s bruised ego. He lost the 2018 mid-terms last November, he lost the battle of wills with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over the government shutdown in January, and now he’s desperately looking for a way to save face.
(Speaking of Trump’s face, the photo that accompanies this post is someone’s best-guess rendering of what Trump would look like if he dropped the orange makeup and the comb-over.)
The worst part of this whole charade is that EVERYONE knows that the fight over the wall is entirely symbolic. Trump only cares about it because he trained his base to salivate whenever he used the word. He campaigned in 2016 as a blunt-talking, swamp-draining fighter for the common man (as long as the common man was white). He also campaigned as the world’s greatest deal-maker.
As the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg notes, it’s easy to boast about possessing those two traits on the campaign trail, but impossible to actually govern that way. You can be a bully, or you can be a negotiator, but not both.
Trump is a natural born bully who revels in being transgressive and doesn’t mind making a lot of enemies in the process. Trump the great deal-maker? Well, we haven’t seen much of that guy. Certainly, Trump has been an abject failure as a deal-maker since he’s been in office. My suspicion is that Trump was never much of a negotiator, and that the deals he brags about were ones in which he made money by stiffing his employees and customers. When your partners are international mobsters, they let you get away with it. But it’s harder to get away with that kind of stuff when you live in the White House and everyone is watching.
The best negotiators look for common ground as they negotiate deals, and try to enlarge that ground so that all sides are happy with the final agreement. Donald Trump spent the first two years of his presidency doing his best to shrink America’s common ground, both externally, with our international partners and internally, among ourselves.
That’s the real emergency we have to deal with.The only walls that will help solve that emergency are the prison walls that will, inshallah, someday soon house members of the Trump crime family. I would gladly pay more taxes to help build those walls