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Donald Trump has been a political escape artist since the beginnings of his shady, scummy, shiftless life. From his spurious (see what I did there?) evasion of the Vietnam War draft to his serial bankruptcies and business failures, his wrecked marriages, and his current reign of misrule, Donald Trump’s ability to detonate a media IED to distract from his troubles has always served him well. Whenever there’s trouble from some Trump outrage, he never apologizes, never corrects his behavior and never, ever goes forth and sins no more. Instead, he deliberately creates some larger outrage, tossing red meat to a media always eager to chase it.
That was the Trump shutdown from the beginning, and the reason for his manic insistence on “The Wall” scam as its justification.
On Tuesday night, Trump’s flaming dumpster train of distractions, lies, cons, and empty political promises flew off the rails and plunged into a mountain of burning tires in one of his worst public speeches.
After 17 days of a government-shutdown temper tantrum, Trump needed a game-changing home run of a speech to change the political climate in D.C. He failed.
This speech wasn’t about saving his utterly fake wall. The $5.7 billion he’s demanded as his vig for ending the shutdown isn’t even close to being seriously considered, and this speech was an overt admission he’s out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas. The crisis he proudly created will end without a wall, and he knows it.
This speech was supposed to be about forcing the national dialogue to stay on the border wall. No such luck. He reeked of defeat, clearly didn’t want to be there, and it showed.
Trump looked exhausted, squinty, and bored, reading in a near-monotone from the Teleprompter. It went over like a wet fart.