Posted by on February 15, 2019 9:58 am
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Categories: News µ Newsjones

Trump can’t make a deal to save his life. Or presidency.

We saw that when he delivered the inexcusable gift of legitimacy to North Korean autocrat Kim Jong-Un by granting him a summit — for nothing other than Trump’s delusional claim that he could cut a deal that would stop the diminutive dictator from making missiles or nuclear weapons. That has not happened — and it is looking increasingly as if Trump made his move based on disinformation straight from his bestie, Russian super-oligarch Vladimir Putin. Trump’s “deal” with Kim now looks like one of the biggest diplomatic debacles in American history.

But then, that’s Americans get when they elect a reality-show host whose campaign centerpiece was building a wall along the United States-Mexico border — a wall that for all intents and purposes already exists where the border can be traversed.

When Democrats took the House of Representatives and held the Senate to a two-seat gain back in November, Trump and his incompetent circle of doctrinaire advisors panicked. The one political factor around which they were able to wrap their lizard brains was that the de facto 2020 presidential campaign started the day Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, They have (probably correctly) assumed that if Trump did not fulfill that promise to his vicious, vacuous, easily manipulated, largely racist deplorables to build that big, beeyootiful wall, his bumpkin base would collapse.

Hostage-taking (i.e. his government shutdown using budget manipulation) failed in spectacular, yuuuge fashion, as even conservatives admit.

This morning, Trump will sign a bill approved by a veto-proof majority that funds the government for the next year — and reportedly plans to declare the lack of a big, beautiful concrete-and/or-steel monstrosity on our southern border a national emergency.

Through a combination of executive authorities — some of which require a national emergency declaration — Trump is aiming to redirect more than $6 billion in federal funds toward the construction of a wall or barrier on the US-Mexico border on top of the $1.375 billion Congress authorized for fencing in the bill Trump will sign Friday morning. If successful, the actions could allow Trump to fund the construction of hundreds of miles of new border barriers.

Trump is expected to sign the bill and paperwork for the executive actions during a 10 a.m. ET event in the Rose Garden, a White House official told CNN.

Democrats will almost certainly challenge the declaration in court, as critics pre-emptively argued that Trump cannot use the national emergency authority to free up taxpayer funds and build the border wall he has long promised his political supporters.

It also needs to be pointed out that Trump wants the slow-motion of avalanche of revelations surrounding Trump’s ties to Russia and efforts by Justice Department officials to investigate the goings-on to stop. That is not going to happen, which means that Trump is relying on something he actually does well: create a distraction, in this case declare a national emergency.

It would not surprise anyone to see Trump’s “national emergency” gambit challenged and thwarted in a matter of days if not hours. It also is yet another indication that Donald Trump, an intellectually and emotionally stunted authoritarian-wannabe, must be removed from office.