Richard Wolffe - Border wall speech: Trump is losing the macho game of staring himself down in the mirror
The Oval Office is an iconic space in American political life. Televised
addresses from the seat of presidential power have marked historic moments of
national anxiety: JFK and the Cuban missile crisis, Ronald Reagan and the
Challenger disaster, George H. W. Bush and the start of the Gulf War.
To that august list we
can now add Donald
Trump and the most pressing crisis facing this commander-in-chief: the
disastrous damage already inflicted on his own ego by his dopey idea of a
beautiful border wall.
This is a very real
crisis inside one man’s cranium and it’s playing out in the living rooms of a
weary nation. That crisis is called reality. At every campaign stop
in 2016, Trump promised to build a wall that Mexico would pay for. Soon it
became clear that Mexico was laughing too loud to pay for anything. Somewhere
along the way, the wall became a series of steel slats.
At this point, it’s
hard to know which one of his many delusions are winning the day. When Trump’s
lapdog Republicans controlled all of Washington, he couldn’t get Congress to
pay for his wall. Now the Democrats control half of Congress, he thinks he can
force Congress to pay for his wall. His forcing mechanism is to shut down his
own government, claim
credit for the shutdown, and then blame everyone else.
Now he looks like a
fool both before and after he loses this macho game of staring himself down in
the mirror. A genius move nobody has ever dared consider. Until now. These desperate times
call for desperate measures. If reality won’t bend to Trump, then Trump will
have to bend reality.
Sitting behind the
Resolute desk where he sometimes poses to sign blank pieces
of paper, Trump reframed his indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants as “a
growing humanitarian and security crisis.” Summoning the shallow reserves of
human empathy that lie buried deep within, he lamented how families were
suffering at the border... read more:
