Four pieces detailing the wreck Trump has made on the wall and the dubious emergency. (Links embedded in headlines.)

 Budget deal makes Trump a YUGE loser (Feb. 12): 

If the White House accepts last night’s tentative budget deal, President Trump will be accepting less money for border security than it could have gotten before the partial government “shutdown” began Dec. 22. The deal thus would represent a hugely embarrassing defeat and expose President Trump as a singularly ineffective negotiator. Forget “the best deals.” This is, for a modern American president, the worst capitulation….

Trump’s worst wall deal, with maybe worse to come (Feb. 18): …

The very fact that this president is trying to use dubious executive authority to solve a spurious “national emergency,” to finance a wall he said Mexico would pay for, to make an end-run around a Congress that had offered him more wall money than he eventually settled for, after costing taxpayers billions of dollars and a nightmare of lost services in a government “shutdown” he deliberately engineered while having no idea how to “win” it, should make it blindingly obvious that he is as feeble a negotiator as the Oval Office has ever seen…. [Oh, and there’s Humpty Dumpty, the Wizard of Oz, Pink Floyd, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in this piece, too.]

Memo to Trump: If this be ‘treason,’ make the least of it (Feb. 18): 

When ordinary people too cavalierly throw around the word “treasonous,” they devalue civil discourse and constitutional understanding. When a president wantonly uses the word, he himself is being almost, well, treasonous.

And if that second sentence above is a slight overstatement, even with the modifier “almost” included, well, it’s still a lot closer to truth and reason than it was for President Trump to tweet the accusation Monday morning at two top law-enforcement officials….

Alexander Hamilton shoots down Trump’s ’emergency’ (Feb. 18):  President Trump’s assertion of supposed emergency powers to appropriate military money for a border wall runs directly afoul of the spirit and intended design of the Constitution….

 

 

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