We begin today’s roundup with an excellent piece by Catherine Rampell on Trump’s art of the deal — which basically involves him backing out of his promises:
The only way to deal with Donald Trump is to not do deals with Donald Trump. The private sector has learned this; when will Congress?
For his entire career, our dealmaker in chief has relied on a not-so-secret technique for extracting supposedly good deals: He agrees to a given set of terms and then, at the last minute, reneges on them.
Eugene Robinson also dives into the current political dynamic, explaining that “Trump’s bluster camouflages great weakness” and that Democrats shouldn’t bow down to Trump’s demands:
For the new year, critics of President Trump should resolve not to be intimidated by the potential wrath of his vaunted political base. The only one who should cower before the Make America Great Again legions is Trump himself.
And he does fear them, bigly. The latest illustration is the way he chickened out on a bipartisan agreement to keep the government fully funded, instead forcing a partial shutdown over chump change for “the wall.” I use quotation marks because there never was going to be an actual, physical, continuous wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, much less one paid for by the Mexican government. The president is desperately trying to avoid acknowledging this and other realities before the 2020 election.
Anyone who thinks Trump is a master politician is wrong. He’s a master illusionist, which isn’t the same thing. Politicians can’t keep pulling rabbits out of empty hats forever. At some point, they face a reckoning, and Trump’s is well underway.
