The correct play for Democrats is to just make fun of him. AOC has figured this out. It’s “dealing with a bully” 101. It works politically and triggers endless own goals from Captain Imbecile.

some D I heard on the radio (maybe Jackie Speier?) was spinning that this deal gave the president less than what he turned down in December. I don't know if that's true (maybe with the beds thing?), but seems dubious.

The Democrats could avoid making the "both sides" comparison accurate by not agreeing with Republicans on obviously immoral and unethical policies.

Except that's not what will happen. Any win is going to be trumpeted to the sky as Trump being a shrewd negotiator and winning one over the Democrats. The supposed renegotiated NAFTA nonsense has like one change and Trump uses that to prove how amazing he supposedly is in negotiating.

That group that pays attention and will see such a deal for what it is is much smaller than you think. 99% of voters go about their life not thinking deeply about anything related to this. They read headlines while getting coffee and move on with the rest of their day.

Worse yet, Trump will see that threatening a shut down gets him some of what he wants. So, he gets 55 miles the first time he threatens a shut down. Well, what about the next time? And the time after that? And the time after that? If he sees that this works, he'll spam it until he gets his whole wall.

That's a given though. He's going to declare victory and his supporters will believe it no matter what. There is no outcome here where he admits defeat.

The question is what damage is actually done. I think if giving him 55 miles ends this for now, that's better than taking a chance on what's behind door number 2 where he declares an emergency and discovers that he has a lot of power to divert a hell of a lot more money from other places. That just opens a door for him to end up actually getting what he wants and having a real win on the wall to trumpet. He might still do that, but at least it looks a lot worse if he's rejecting a bipartisan deal first rather than just using it as a tool to break a partisan deadlock.

He can't just snap his fingers and shut down the government whenever he wants though. Presumably this deal funds the government until next year, so he only really has one more crack at this then. And I'm not so sure that the lesson he takes from this whole ordeal is that he can get whatever he wants from a shutdown. He's getting beat up from all sides on this and is desperately looking for a face-saving escape hatch at this point.

Except that a national emergency for a wall will result in pretty much every civil rights group suing the government. The case would likely end up going to SCOTUS where there's precedent in the courts stopping **** like this. For example, Truman was prevented from nationalizing the steel industry during The Korean War by SCOTUS. Even if the courts rule in favor of the government, Trump will hopefully be out of office by then and the next POTUS will recognize how stupid a wall is. Even if Trump is in office, the process of building the wall would take well over a decade to build as civil rights groups will likely be suing everybody they can in every state to stall the building process. One World Trade Center took over a decade to complete and people actually wanted it. Of course all of this could be irrelevant if Congress votes against this happening which would likely happen.

Barring Trump becoming dictator, a wall will not be completed. It will be another wedge issue that will create future single-issue voters for decades to come.

Not in a million years. His base doesn't care about any of the details of the negotiation. They don't even accept reality - if Trump says it's a huge win, they'll say it's a huge win, full stop. It's a cult. He will only lose support when supporters feel individual pain. See the kerfuffle re: tax returns. It takes direct personal damage to penetrate their denial of reality.

I still have this morbid desire to see Trump veto the bill and declare a national emergency. I know it would be bad for the country, but I kind of want to watch the horror movie.

If he’s going to declare a win no matter what, why give him anything at all?

Even this is unlikely. These people are stupid and they have pathetically short memories. Millions of them were going to lose their healthcare (or actually did) and they stayed with Trump. You have reports of farmers losing workers and even their actual farms due to Trump and still supporting him. My older family members spent a good chunk of Christmas Eve complaining about their massive medical bills and they still support Trump.

The truth is that these people don't support Trump because of his policies. They don't know anything about policy. They support him because he is an exaggerated version of who they are as human beings. He talks at their level. He thinks at their level. He acts with their level of logic and thinking. He values exactly what they value and hates who and what they hate. Donald Trump is the man deplorables want to be and the kind of man deplorable women want to marry and ****.

The best article I ever read about who Trump supporters are was covered in an episode of Chapo Trap House. This isn't about the salt-of-the-Earth types. Those ****ers don't vote, period. This is about Trump supporters who actually do the supporting.

Because if you give him literally nothing in the deal and everyone knows it, even he won't try to spin that, he'll just declare an emergency and divert some money that way, probably a whole lot more than what's being offered. I suppose it's debatable whether that's a better outcome because maybe the courts would stop it or it would look bad for him politically, but I'd personally rather not go down the path of encouraging him to test his powers as a dictator while just trusting that the system will hold him in check. Let him have his little fake victory rally while he just continues Obama's border fencing policies (that can easily be undone) until the clock runs out on him imo.

Yup

It's not the Democrats vs Trump. The democrats are negotiating with congressional republicans and they want some wall/border stuff too. Give them the 1.3 billion and let's move on. If the dems controlled every single congressional seat, they'd obviously give him nothing. But they can't do that. That's why it's a compromise.

And in this compromise, the Dems give them 1.3 billion for the wall. In return, the Republicans give the Dems ??? for ???.

Or is this like that time the GOP gave the Dems a little gun control so we could move on? Or a little healthcare so we could move on?

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Wtf does hooked up with lots of money from other sources mean?

IT MEANS THE WALL WILL BE BUILT AND A BIG VICTORY FOR DONALD J TRUMP!!!!

No reason to shut the government down or declare a national emergency then!

my [redacted] gimmick account was sadly banned due to the new rules insisting we softplay the conservatives, so you'll just have to use your imagination for this one:

still, democrats get nothing while republicans get to piss away money on 55 miles of fence that could instead be used for lots of better things.

The Senate just passed the decade’s biggest public lands package. Here’s what’s in it.

The Senate on Tuesday passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes including Civil War soldiers and a civil rights icon.

The 662-page measure, which passed 92 to 8, represented an old-fashioned approach to dealmaking that has largely disappeared on Capitol Hill. Senators from across the ideological spectrum celebrated home-state gains and congratulated each other for bridging the partisan divide.

“It touches every state, features the input of a wide coalition of our colleagues, and has earned the support of a broad, diverse coalition of many advocates for public lands, economic development, and conservation," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

It’s a paradoxical win for conservation at a time when President Trump has promoted development on public lands and scaled back safeguards established by his predecessors.

...

The measure protects 1.3 million acres as wilderness, the nation’s most stringent protection, which prohibits even roads and motorized vehicles. It permanently withdraws more than 370,000 acres of land from mining around two national parks, including Yellowstone, and permanently authorizes a program to spend offshore-drilling revenue on conservation efforts.

...

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who co-authored the bill, inserted a provision that allows native Alaskans who served in Vietnam to apply for a land allotment in their home state.

Sure. I meant that personal harm is a necessary condition for them dropping their support, but it's not sufficient. There's plenty of people in the cult that will be all in all the way down.