How Trump Is Rolling Over His Opponents in Congress
President Trump has begun to move ahead on the creation of a wall separating the United States and Mexico. He is using executive orders to begin the process.
He does have to have Congressional authorization for completing the wall. I think he is making it clear to his political base that he is serious about this campaign promise, which was his main campaign promise. By beginning the process, he is going to box in Congress. If he can go to his base and tell them that Congress is unwilling to follow through on what he has already begun, he puts the onus of open borders onto the Republicans in Congress. At that point, they will be in a difficult position politically.
They can still block this funding in the Senate. It will not take a lot of Republicans to block it if they join with Democratic senators to do this. The Senate can stop this thing. The majority that the Republican Party possesses in the Senate is very thin. I think there will be Republican Senators who cross the aisle on this issue, and who vote against any funding of the wall. I could be wrong about this, but at least I will get an opportunity to have my theory tested.
The point is this: if the Senate blocks the bill submitted by the House of Representatives, then Trump is in a position to say that he did his best. His supporters understand that he cannot do this unilaterally. They understand that a bill must get through both the Senate and the House in order to land on his desk for his signature. He will get credit for having attempted to implement his promise even if the Senate blocks the bill.
If the Senate blocks the bill, he can then begin to implement a digital wall. He can start moving Army troops to the most likely crossing points. He can start having satellite tracking of the border. He can authorize a small Air Force of inexpensive drones to be used by the military and the immigration authorities to block crossings. From a financial standpoint, this is what he ought to do anyway. He ought to do this first. He puts up the digital wall immediately, and he gets a lot of publicity for this.
He is getting a tremendous amount of publicity for just beginning the process of building a physical wall. Because the idea is popular, he is making inroads within the Democratic Party. He is rebuilding Reagan's political alliance with blue-collar Democrats.
He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Congress has nothing to say about where he assigns troops. He can bring troops home from Europe. He can pull them out of NATO. The extent of his authority is almost unlimited with respect to how he allocates the resources of the Pentagon. He holds the hammer. Congress has nothing to say about this. He would have so much support for this that Republicans in Congress would be in the peanut gallery, cheering. They could go to their own constituents and hail Donald Trump as a commander-in-chief who is doing everything he can to defend America's southern border.
This would send a message to the Council on Foreign Relations: the New World Order is about to become the dismantled world order. Once he pulls troops out of Europe, and once he severs the connection with NATO, it will take a new President to put the pieces back together. But that would take a reversal of policy that has gained tremendous political support. Once Trump starts removing pieces out of globalists' Rube Goldberg contraption, it's going to start falling apart. It will have four years to fall apart under his Presidency. It will be extremely difficult to put those pieces back together. His successor probably will not attempt this.
By moving rapidly on the issue of the wall on the second working day of his Presidency, Trump is sending a message to his opponents, and he is also sending a message to his supporters. He is telling them that he is deadly serious about stopping the immigration. Already, the mainstream media are on his back about this. But they're going to be on his back every day for the next four years. They will not give him a moment's rest. So, he has trapped them once again. They are reporting to their readers and viewers what he is doing. Among those readers and viewers are millions of his constituents. They are being reminded, day by day, that he is following through on his main promises. They are being reminded that, at this point, he has zero political opposition in Congress.
Trump is establishing policies in the first week of his Presidency that Congress is probably not going to attempt to reverse, and even if Republicans join with Democrats to reverse any of these policies, they will be operational by the time Congress does anything effective. There is really not much that Congress can do, other than messing with the budget. Congress does have power to reverse executive orders, although Congress almost never does this. But for the Republicans in Congress to do this, they have got to go head-to-head against Trump immediately, and to do this, they must break ranks with the voters who re-elected them in November. It's clear that Republican voters are on Trump's side.
On the issue of the wall on the southern border, Trump has tremendous support within the Democratic Party. Democrats in Congress who attempt to fight him on this, other than simply refusing to vote for the funding, are taking a chance of alienating their own voter base.
Trump is building political bridges with his wall. I heard one out-of-touch panel member on CNN say that Trump is not reaching out. This woman is blind. Trump is reaching out to the Democrats who want him to do something about immigration, and who also want him to do something about foreign competition. If he continues to reach out like this, he is going to make life miserable for Democrats in Congress who oppose him on these fundamental issues. These are the issues that got him elected. He understands this, and the talking heads on CNN do not.
We are seeing what we saw through his entire campaign. The media cannot leave him alone. They really are like moths drawn to a flame. The problem for them is this: he is completely in charge of his agenda, and he is advancing that agenda with remarkable rapidity. This is like a military campaign. He is literally rolling through the opposition in an invasion. There is no opposition. Democrats in Congress are doing nothing.
If I were a political cartoonist, I would draw a cartoon of Trump shouting into a megaphone, and on the side of the megaphone it would say MSM. It would be held up jointly by three people. They would be wearing flak jackets with this on the appropriate back: ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Meanwhile, he uses Twitter to do an end run around the MSM all day long. They wind up quoting his Twitter posts. This only builds his brand.
Trump is in complete control of the media. He has been from the beginning of his campaign. What they report as if Trump were violating fundamental rights of the people, his supporters and a good chunk of the Democrats regard as the implementation of programs favored by the people.
Here is the fact: Trump is systematically implementing a multi-faceted program that is consistent with his campaign promises. At the same time, opponents in Congress, who should have known that he would do this, are in complete disarray. This has the look of the New England Patriots playing Hawthorne Country Day School. It is an extraordinary mismatch.