In the land of make-believe

On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted, “We will not cave!” On Friday, Trump caved.

Conceding at least short-term defeat over the shutdown he initiated, the U.S. president announced in a speech on Friday that he had come to an agreement with Democrats to sign a bill to fund the U.S. federal government for three weeks, until Feb. 15, without getting any funding for a wall on the Mexican border.

[...]

On Friday morning, a large number of absences by air traffic controllers, who are going unpaid, caused significant delays at major airports in New York, Atlanta and elsewhere. And FBI Director Christopher Wray released an extraordinary video message to employees in which he said, “Making some people stay home when they don’t want to, and making others show up without pay — it’s mind-boggling, it’s short-sighted, and it’s unfair. It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time.”

Trump’s lack of leverage was made clear in the Senate on Thursday, when the Democratic proposal — two weeks of government funding, no wall funding — received more votes in the Republican-controlled Senate than Trump’s proposal that included the wall funding.

[...]

Trump’s opponents reacted to his decision with more exasperation than glee. “So Trump is agreeing to the EXACT SAME DEAL he rejected 35 days ago. What a debacle. I’m so so sorry, America,” Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on Twitter. “How pathetic,” independent left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote on Twitter. “Trump shut down the government, held 800,000 federal employees hostage and disrupted vital federal services for absolutely nothing.”

  

He makes the best deals.

“I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government,” he said in the Rose Garden of the White House, then ad-libbed: “As everyone knows, I have a very powerful alternative. But I didn’t want to use it at this time. Hopefully it will be unnecessary.”

Despite his bravado, there was no doubt in Washington that this was a surrender to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump had repeatedly insisted he would not sign any bill that did not include the wall money Pelosi had rejected. Senate Republicans, acting on Trump’s wishes, had voted Thursday to reject a proposal without wall money.

Trump made no effort to explain why he had rejected similar offers for five weeks but was now changing his mind. Returning to his standard warning about crime by illegal immigrants and his lurid tales about human trafficking, he insisted that Democrats “have finally and fully acknowledged” that “barriers or fences or walls” will be “an important part of the solution” — though they had not made any such public admission.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.