This is a moment made for Donald Trump.
For years, Democrats have successfully used government shutdowns to slap wimpy Republicans around and paint them as cold, ineffectual cream puffs who don’t care about the regular people who depend on a functioning government.
Remember the political theater of the 2013 government shutdown, when veterans and little kids were barricaded out of the national monuments and Nancy Pelosi was calling the Republicans legislative arsonists?
That’s not going to work with the bad hombre in the White House — he was born to brawl.
So Dems have been trying to use Trump’s own street-fighting tactics against him all week, attempting to kneecap the president in the lead-up to the shutdown.
First they sent in Sen. Dick Durbin to blow up the DACA talks by tattling on the president — like a 3-year-old — for his mean language. Apparently Durbin and his high-minded fellow Democrats were simply incapable of working toward a legislative compromise with someone who would use such a crass word.
But the voters didn’t buy that. Instead, they were just reminded that Durbin is the senator who did his best to rally the enemy to kill American soldiers during the Iraq War by comparing them to Stalin and the Nazis. Think he cares if our servicemen get paid? Please.
Then, a few days ago, Americans were treated to Sen. Cory Booker unmercifully screaming at Kirstjen Nielsen, the director of Homeland Security, over her “complicity” with Trump’s “ignorance and bigotry” during the DACA talks.
Booker’s transparent attempt to set up the shutdown as a moral imperative against Trump ended up making a stark visual in the #Metoo era.
Strike two.
And so it was the establishment media’s turn to go to bat for their liberal cronies in Congress, and they did just that, spending more than an hour hammering the president’s physician with wacky questions about POTUS’ ice cream and fast-food habits, whether he wears dentures, and a truckload of other silly inquiries.
My favorite was CNN bimbo Jim Acosta’s question: “Is there anything you’re keeping from us for privacy reasons?”
Yeah, Jim. Now that you ask, he’s got leprosy. Idiot.
Democrats did their best to fill the news cycle with distracting toxicity leading up to the shutdown we’re in, but it didn’t take. People see it for what it is. Disgraceful political opportunism. Democratic senators don’t oppose much of the spending bill at all, and they pretended there was moral urgency with DACA.
They are pandering to a small and radical base that wants a shutdown so they can use it to win in November. They have cynically sabotaged compromise at every opportunity in hopes that, as usual, Republicans will get the blame and they will come out looking like the noble “Resistance” to Republican dysfunction.
The truth is the Democrats were elected by American citizens but chose to do the bidding of non-citizens instead of their own constituents.
Weaponizing a government shutdown was once a reliable win for Dems but Trump threw them off their game, and soon, huddled in their trenches, they’ll realize they tossed the pin and are holding the grenade.
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