Trump Lost the Shutdown, But At Least God Made Him President, and He’s Building That Wall
Trump suffered the worst defeat of his Presidency when, after single-handedly shutting down a large part of the federal government for more than a month in order to demand billions of dollars in funding for his border wall, he was forced to end the shutdown without getting a single dollar. (This has been misportrayed in some accounts as a “deal” with congressional Democrats; it was not a deal—Trump, losing support from Republicans to keep the government shut down, simply caved.) The same day, the F.B.I. arrested Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest political associates and the first person who believed Trump could, and would, become President someday. Stone now faces up to forty-five years in prison, on charges that he secretly coördinated with WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign on the release of Russian-hacked Democratic e-mails from the 2016 Presidential campaign and then lied to Congress about it.
It’s hardly surprising that, in the days since his shutdown humiliation, Trump has retreated into the virtual seclusion of Twitter, holed up watching cable news and tweeting his alternative reality as America struggles with an actual deep freeze. For Trump, the fake world is much better than the real one. There is no extreme weather in his White House; in fact, climate change does not exist inside its walls. Trump’s policy has decreed it. He’s avoiding more than just the frigid air outside; in the cocoon of the Oval Office, there are only invited guests and staff who, while they may be secretly leaking unflattering accounts, at least have the good sense to be nice to Trump’s face. In recent days, the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has compared Trump to a petulant toddler and openly wondered what Russia has on him. Why would Trump want to spend his time negotiating with her? Much better, from Trump’s point of view, to simply announce, as he did to reporters on Thursday, that “Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall,” and spend the day with his own press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who this week told an interviewer that God “wanted Donald Trump to become President.”
On Wednesday, Trump created another mini-furor by openly disputing the intelligence assessments of his own government. A day earlier, his spy chiefs had testified to Congress about their annual global-threats report, and it was lost on no one that their findings clashed mightily with the key assumptions underpinning the President’s approach to Iran, North Korea, and isis. Trump seemed to have missed the testimony, but he caught the negative TV coverage, and his tweets Wednesday burned with anger at the officials he had appointed. They were “extremely passive and naive,” he tweeted, and hadn’t a clue about the great success of his major foreign-policy initiatives. Trump was rightfully barraged with criticism from the fact-based community; in response, he hauled the unhappy-looking spy chiefs in for an Oval Office photo op on Thursday and blamed the media for misreporting their televised testimony. “We are all on the same page!” he tweeted. But neither Trump nor the intelligence community backed down a bit on the substance of the controversy, even as it perfectly distilled this low moment in Trump’s Presidency: with reality looking so grim, why not pretend to live in a world where North Korea is disarming, Iran is the deal-breaker, and a big, beautiful, soon-to-be-built wall is defending us from the southern invaders? Anything can be true in a world where God himself made you President and everybody who disagrees with you is wrong.
Of course, it is already a well-established truth that the Trump Presidency has been replete with reality-distorting lies. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the President made 7,645 false or misleading claims over the first seven hundred and ten days of his term, for an average rate of eleven per day. That total is as of December 30th, which means it does not account for the blizzard of fakery kept up by Trump through much of the thirty-five-day government shutdown and a subsequent week of post-shutdown spin.
From the beginning, the question was not whether Trump would lie but what the rest of Washington would do about it. And, on that point, I have long been struck by how successful Trump seems to be at getting others to go along with previously unthinkable plans (and in getting rid of those who do not). That “invasion” from the south may be fake, but those are real troops that the Pentagon agreed to send to the border just days before last fall’s midterm elections; it is now sending more than three thousand additional U.S. soldiers, for a deployment whose total cost, officials testified this week, will exceed six hundred million dollars by September. How is this not a bigger deal? We have deployed thousands of troops, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, for a nakedly political fake war, to combat an “invasion” on U.S. soil that does not exist. This has gone well beyond tweets.
And yet Sanders is far from the only remaining true believer in Trump. In the hours after the intelligence chiefs’ testimony, the faithful at Fox News defended the President against his treacherous subordinates, especially the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. “What the hell is wrong with the D.N.I.?” the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a longtime confidant of Trump, demanded. In response, his guest Fred Fleitz, a former senior official on Trump’s National Security Council, said that Coats should be fired. “Intelligence . . . is not supposed to second-guess Presidential policy,” he said.
Fleitz, who served as a C.I.A. analyst for nineteen years before briefly becoming the chief of staff on Trump’s N.S.C., last year, was sticking with that line the next day, when I called him to ask about the incendiary segment. Coats “crossed the line,” he told me, by “undermining the President in a public setting and grandstanding.” Still, Fleitz wanted to be clear, he wasn’t against intelligence analysts disagreeing with Trump but against the fact that they were doing so in public. He added, “I’ve been reading all kinds of things on the Internet that sound like I disagree with intelligence analysts that provide analysis that goes against the President. I don’t. I’m against public spectacles that are trying to judge the President’s policy, that are going to undermine the President’s policy.” For Trump’s embattled supporters, we may be reaching the shoot-the-messenger phase of the Presidency.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-tr...-that-wall
Trump suffered the worst defeat of his Presidency when, after single-handedly shutting down a large part of the federal government for more than a month in order to demand billions of dollars in funding for his border wall, he was forced to end the shutdown without getting a single dollar. (This has been misportrayed in some accounts as a “deal” with congressional Democrats; it was not a deal—Trump, losing support from Republicans to keep the government shut down, simply caved.) The same day, the F.B.I. arrested Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest political associates and the first person who believed Trump could, and would, become President someday. Stone now faces up to forty-five years in prison, on charges that he secretly coördinated with WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign on the release of Russian-hacked Democratic e-mails from the 2016 Presidential campaign and then lied to Congress about it.
It’s hardly surprising that, in the days since his shutdown humiliation, Trump has retreated into the virtual seclusion of Twitter, holed up watching cable news and tweeting his alternative reality as America struggles with an actual deep freeze. For Trump, the fake world is much better than the real one. There is no extreme weather in his White House; in fact, climate change does not exist inside its walls. Trump’s policy has decreed it. He’s avoiding more than just the frigid air outside; in the cocoon of the Oval Office, there are only invited guests and staff who, while they may be secretly leaking unflattering accounts, at least have the good sense to be nice to Trump’s face. In recent days, the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has compared Trump to a petulant toddler and openly wondered what Russia has on him. Why would Trump want to spend his time negotiating with her? Much better, from Trump’s point of view, to simply announce, as he did to reporters on Thursday, that “Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall,” and spend the day with his own press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who this week told an interviewer that God “wanted Donald Trump to become President.”
On Wednesday, Trump created another mini-furor by openly disputing the intelligence assessments of his own government. A day earlier, his spy chiefs had testified to Congress about their annual global-threats report, and it was lost on no one that their findings clashed mightily with the key assumptions underpinning the President’s approach to Iran, North Korea, and isis. Trump seemed to have missed the testimony, but he caught the negative TV coverage, and his tweets Wednesday burned with anger at the officials he had appointed. They were “extremely passive and naive,” he tweeted, and hadn’t a clue about the great success of his major foreign-policy initiatives. Trump was rightfully barraged with criticism from the fact-based community; in response, he hauled the unhappy-looking spy chiefs in for an Oval Office photo op on Thursday and blamed the media for misreporting their televised testimony. “We are all on the same page!” he tweeted. But neither Trump nor the intelligence community backed down a bit on the substance of the controversy, even as it perfectly distilled this low moment in Trump’s Presidency: with reality looking so grim, why not pretend to live in a world where North Korea is disarming, Iran is the deal-breaker, and a big, beautiful, soon-to-be-built wall is defending us from the southern invaders? Anything can be true in a world where God himself made you President and everybody who disagrees with you is wrong.
Of course, it is already a well-established truth that the Trump Presidency has been replete with reality-distorting lies. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the President made 7,645 false or misleading claims over the first seven hundred and ten days of his term, for an average rate of eleven per day. That total is as of December 30th, which means it does not account for the blizzard of fakery kept up by Trump through much of the thirty-five-day government shutdown and a subsequent week of post-shutdown spin.
From the beginning, the question was not whether Trump would lie but what the rest of Washington would do about it. And, on that point, I have long been struck by how successful Trump seems to be at getting others to go along with previously unthinkable plans (and in getting rid of those who do not). That “invasion” from the south may be fake, but those are real troops that the Pentagon agreed to send to the border just days before last fall’s midterm elections; it is now sending more than three thousand additional U.S. soldiers, for a deployment whose total cost, officials testified this week, will exceed six hundred million dollars by September. How is this not a bigger deal? We have deployed thousands of troops, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, for a nakedly political fake war, to combat an “invasion” on U.S. soil that does not exist. This has gone well beyond tweets.
And yet Sanders is far from the only remaining true believer in Trump. In the hours after the intelligence chiefs’ testimony, the faithful at Fox News defended the President against his treacherous subordinates, especially the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. “What the hell is wrong with the D.N.I.?” the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a longtime confidant of Trump, demanded. In response, his guest Fred Fleitz, a former senior official on Trump’s National Security Council, said that Coats should be fired. “Intelligence . . . is not supposed to second-guess Presidential policy,” he said.
Fleitz, who served as a C.I.A. analyst for nineteen years before briefly becoming the chief of staff on Trump’s N.S.C., last year, was sticking with that line the next day, when I called him to ask about the incendiary segment. Coats “crossed the line,” he told me, by “undermining the President in a public setting and grandstanding.” Still, Fleitz wanted to be clear, he wasn’t against intelligence analysts disagreeing with Trump but against the fact that they were doing so in public. He added, “I’ve been reading all kinds of things on the Internet that sound like I disagree with intelligence analysts that provide analysis that goes against the President. I don’t. I’m against public spectacles that are trying to judge the President’s policy, that are going to undermine the President’s policy.” For Trump’s embattled supporters, we may be reaching the shoot-the-messenger phase of the Presidency.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-tr...-that-wall
