January 8, 2019--Trump's Emergency

With the Mueller report likely to surface soon, Trump is experiencing his own private emergency and now he appears to want to drag the rest of us into a much larger, generalized one. A national emergency.

His is real, the one he has in store for us concocted.

At first, hearing about the possibility that Trump was finally trumped, with some Democratic friends I was gleeful.

"This only shows Trump's desperation," one said. Another, that "He's finally painted himself into a corner from which there is no way out."

But then I thought more about this. Yes, there may be no easy exit from the trap he clumsily set for himself, with Nancy Pelosi playing him subtly like a well-tuned piano. And on the other side, to his base, there is more trouble represented by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, both of whom warned that they would call his manhood into question if he caved in to the Dems by agreeing to reopen the government as part of a deal that would get him a pittance more for his cement, steel, tissue paper wall, fence, barrier, curtain, whatever. Call it anything you like. He just wanted out of the trap.

For the man whose ghostwriter wrote the book on the art of the deals it was looking bleak. No deal in sight. Just plunging poll numbers.

But then there is the potential game-changing idea for Trump to declare a national emergency--he would claim, as he did last night in an Oval Office speech, that the country is threatened by caravans of murderers, rapists, gang members, and drug dealers, augmented by tens of thousands of terrorists sneaking annually across the border. And, oh yes, there is a humanitarian crisis.

Never mind that there were just six (6) potential terrorists who were intercepted by the border patrol during the first half of 2018. Compounding this lie, Trump went on, claiming most of the opioids threatening our young people are coming though the same way--strapped to Mexican MS-13 gang members, while in fact they are hidden in and smuggled across the border by otherwise legitimate big-rig truckers.

If Trump declares a national emergency (and he has the power to do so), he will no longer need Congress (read Democrats in the House of Representatives) to pass a Homeland Security Department budget with $5.0 million allocated for the wall because he will just redeploy those and many more billions from the Pentagon budget (in an official emergency he likely has the power to do that as well as deploy soldiers to take the lead in building the wall).

By this scenario Nancy and Chuck will become irrelevant, Trump will look extra macho to Ann Coulter, Rush will be re-smitten, and too much of the public will think that Trump did the bold and right thing to protect us from all those dangerous brown people heading north on moonless nights.

And then the final irony--since it will cost $50 to $100 billion to build a 500-mile wall, because the money will have come from the Pentagon budget, Trump will demagog Chuck and Nancy into coming up with enough to replace it. The last thing Dems want is to appear wimpy when it comes to military spending. You know--"support our troops."

This strategy is so perversely brilliant that it could have come from only one source. Trump's current senior staff and advisors are incapable of thinking about how to get themselves out of a paper bag and so a play this multi-layered and intricate is beyond their devious capacities.

Therefore this has to be the idea of only one possible person. One evil genius--

Steve Bannon. Remember him?

The only problem--it won't work. 

Trump's favorables will continue to hover in the 35 percent range. His act is becoming boring to all except his relatively few dead-ender followers. Even Steve Bannon will not be able to think his way out of that.