“I think Trump is truly surprised at how far Pelosi was willing to take brinksmanship”
If he is surprised then he has very little understanding of his enemy.
They will go to do the death of tens of millions of Americans to get what they want. There is NO limit - except their own personal destruction- to how far they will go.
I’m not sure Trump understood this.
Wondering what cudgel Pelosi is going to hold over Trump’s head now? I mean ok, govt is open temporarily, now what?
You may be describing banzai soldiers in WWII, or Mongol hordes attacking peasant villages, or Spartan armies thousands of years ago. But we're talking about fellow citizens holding Constitutional offices who were elected by their neighbors.
Nobody has any understanding if the opponent has truly gone mad. We're not at the point of neighbor hating neighbor to the death yet, despite what's being written about MAGA hats and Catholic schools.
I believe that Trump felt that Pelosi was going to see reason and bring a compromise to the table. She didn't. Even when she was faced with calls from government workers to negotiate, even when Hoyer said that walls work and are not immoral, even when the TSA started to put our airports at risk, Pelosi was unmovable to the point of actually planning a family vacation to Europe during the whole thing.
I think that's when Trump realized that he's not dealing with a rational person on the other side. I think that's why he's calling for this three-week resetting of the table, so that the Democrats can rein in their wild horses and come back with a plan to negotiate.
The sword of a shutdown is still hanging out there, and the last resort of an emergency declaration is also still in play.
And the people are watching. I'm watching Pelosi right now on TV, and she's smiling like a schoolgirl right now. That tells me that this has been about nothing but her personal power, but I still think that most people will conclude that she's too unstable with it for all our good.
-PJ
I think he is letting her save face, eating crow, gettingthe meeting started again.
I am one who is quite willing to arrange “their own personal destruction.”