As Trump crashes on border wall, Schumer and Pelosi pick up the pieces

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Last night, a defeated-looking Trump broke himself on his Wall, giving an Oval Office speech that was flat, uninspired and read off of a script. Trumped also sniffed repeatedly, as he did during his presidential debates against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump even reportedly told television anchors before the address that the speech, seeking taxpayer funding for his border wall purportedly because of a U.S./Mexico border “crisis,” was going to be “pointless,” and something his advisors had pushed him to do against his will.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a televised response to Trump. In contrast to Trump, Schumer and Pelosi sounded like the adults in the room, hitting all the right notes as they treated Trump like a misbehaving child. Among the points both Schumer and Pelosi made were:

–Donald Trump is holding America hostage by shutting down the government.
–Trump’s shutdown, which has stopped the paychecks of federal workers, is “hurting millions of Americans who are treated as leverage.”
–Trump repeatedly had told us Mexico would pay for the wall.
–“We don’t govern by temper tantrum.”
–Democrats want effective border security, but an ancient technology, expensive concrete wall does not achieve such protection.
–There is no immigration or border “crisis,” other than the crisis that Trump has manufactured.
–The Trump Shutdown should be decoupled from discussions about border security.
–“The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”

As Schumer and Pelosi pointed out, Trump’s fundamental mistake was shutting down the government and holding America hostage simply because he had not gotten his way on border wall funding. It’s a president’s and a party’s failure by definition if they are in control of both the Executive Branch and the Congress (as Trump and the Republicans were through the new year) and they can’t even keep the government running. Moreover, the Constitution envisions many situations where a president would not get his way, including having legislation originate from the Congress, overriding a president’s veto, and more. That is simply the give and take, or “checks and balances,” on which our country is based, and it’s absurd to think that the president should shut down the government each time that happens. Finally, if there really was a border “crisis” or “emergency,” then it was criminally irresponsible for Trump to shut down the government, cause security screeners to stay home, and make us less safe.

The onus last night was on Trump to move the needle and get Americans to pressure their representatives in Congress to change their votes. A continued stalemate is a loss for Trump, in terms of actual votes, appearing to look weak, and failure to run his own government. On this measure, Trump certainly appears to be defeated, as even several Senate Republicans (Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Cory Gardner) now say they will vote with Democrats to reopen the government without tying such reopening to wall funding. Donald Trump’s gambit of shutting down the government to get his way on one issue may go down as one of the biggest political blunders in U.S. history. In the meantime, the rest of us are left to clean up Trump’s mess.