Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump Caves on Mexican Wall to Prevent Government Shutdown

Donald Trump's signature campaign promise was a vow to erect a wall along the southern border of the US and force Mexico to pay for the construction. As president, he has said Americans will pay for it, and then somehow, Mexico will reimburse the US Treasury. In his latest climbdown, he insisted that any legislation that funds the government beyond midnight Friday (when current funding runs out) must include a down payment on the wall. That insistence held up for about 24 hours. When one looks at this and at his behavior in the healthcare fiasco, it becomes clear that Mr. Trump bluffs a great deal, and that one can take everything he has simply by calling his bluff.

On Sunday April 30, Donald Trump will have been president for 100 days, and he has nothing much to show for it. He did get a judge confirmed on the bench of the Supreme Court, thanks to a rule change in the Senate. And he has signed a raft of executives orders, many of which have not been challenged and halted by the courts. But he has yet to sign a bill passed in Congress that has any meaning whatsoever.

Mr. Trump is painfully sensitive about how he looks in comparison to others. He claims to have had the most productive first 100 days in the history of the US, but that is demonstrably untrue. He'd be lucky not to find himself in the bottom quintile. He worries a great deal about polls, which are uniform in saying he is unpopular with most Americans. He wants so desperately to be liked and to be successful. That he is neither as president has him tweeting in the middle of the night.

Part of the problem is that he doesn't understand how to govern, which is much different from the art of the deal in business. In his real estate world, it is rare to make more than one deal with the same partner/adversary. Lie, cheat, steal, do whatever is advantageous because one won't cross paths with the counterparty in the future. Government is just the opposite. Deals struck in government are part of relationships that go back years and may well go forward even farther in time. Bluff and bluster work once or twice at best. After that, the other side figures out what's going on.

Taking the case of the healthcare bill, candidate Donald Trump promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. When some Republicans feared a backlash, he argued that he wanted them to go on record by voting not to repeal Obamacare. In the end, Paul Ryan couldn't get the votes to pass it, and the vote Mr. Trump insisted on holding was abandoned.

As for his wall, he thought it was a good tactical move to insist on adding funds for it as part of keeping the government functioning passed Friday. He believed it was a proposal that would force the Congress to yield. As it turns out, he would have celebrated the first 100 days as president with a government shutdown despite his party controlling the relevant branches of government. Many Republicans don't want to spend the kind of money the wall will cost, and others are still taking candidate Trump's statement at face value that Mexico will pay for the wall. So, let the Mexican congress fund it.

It is no wonder that his casinos in Atlantic City went broke. The man is a lousy poker player. Professional poker player Phil Hellmuth argued some months ago that Mr. Trump was the ultimate loose-aggressive poker player, one who plays any hand with aggressive bets and lots of table chatter. "When you're playing against a loose-aggressive player, think of a harpoon," Mr. Hellmuth said in an interview with TheStreet.com a year ago. "You nail them with a harpoon, on one big pot for all their chips. They're a big target, and Trump is a big target."

The trick about bluffing in poker (and politics) is that it doesn't work if the other guy has better cards and knows it. From here on, his opponents should simply call his hand every time it looks like he's bluffing. The odds are that he doesn't have the cards to win.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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