Chicago Tribune (April 5)
“Trump is terrible at making deals. His threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border offers the latest example…. Trump tried to get Mexico to pay for his cherished wall and failed. He tried to get Congress to provide $5.7 billion to construct it and failed despite putting the country through a 35-day government shutdown.” The President “is good at making demands and issuing threats, but those are useful only if you know how to bargain and compromise. He fails at making deals because he has never learned that in negotiations, as in war, the other side gets a vote.”
Tags: Border, Compromise, Demands, Failed, Making deals, Mexico, Negotiations, Shutdown, Terrible, Threats, Trump, U.S., Wall
New York Times (January 9)
“When it comes to the border and the wall, Trump’s willful estrangement from reality is so profound that network executives and newspaper editors spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to his inevitable barrage of falsehoods. Should there be a crawl of words on the bottom of the television screen to correct him in real time? Could fact checkers work speedily enough to post rebuttals online…? This is where we find ourselves. Other presidents have been untrustworthy, and others have had to be called out on it. But not like this. This is surreal.”
Tags: Border, Fact checkers, Falsehoods, Reality, Rebuttals, Strategy, Surreal, Trump, Untrustworthy, Wall
Wall Street Journal (January 7)
“Trump can’t afford to lose.” He has the “biggest incentive” to dig into his position with “more to lose than the Democrats do. This shutdown was neither necessary nor inevitable…. It was the president who delivered the ultimatum: Fund the wall, he demanded, or he’d be “’proud to shut down the government for border security.’” Without an “outright victory,” Trump will lose “a fight that he picked. He’d end the shutdown weaker than he started. And some of his most ardent supporters could well turn on him for selling them out on his signature issue, affecting his re-election in 2020.” Still, “none of this guarantees a Trump victory.”
