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[smjjames]

It was just a tamer version of his usual pandering to the base rally speeches. Still came off as trying to build pretense or support for something without really specifically saying what it's for.

[Trekkin]

As smjjames said, it was mostly points from his rallies rehashed without any energy or vulgarity, which took his usual rant and turned it into a ramble. His natural and only cadence sucks for anything other than shouting anyway.

This was an abysmal failure by any metric. Trump went into tonight needing something momentous to shift the narrative from the shutdown to the wall proper; he's losing that fight, both according to the polls and according to the usual anonymous sources regarding Congressional wherewithal (which presumably accord with what they're telling him in person.) He's also out of proxies that can credibly make this case. Miller was laughed off the stage in a cloud of spray-on hair, anything Conway says is going to be undercut by her husband, and McConnell has cast things so deferentially that no Republican congressperson can really say more than they have without getting out ahead of their party. Nielsen vociferously doesn't want any part of this, and his "actings" are going to face awkward questions of their own. This one was always going to be on him, and that means his reputation as a salesman is on the line. Further, while Presidents have historically been able to get the nation's attention like this, there's no law saying the networks have to give him airtime, and someone in his orbit had to know going in that any defense of the wall was going to give them a good reason to refuse going forward. This was always going to be his last, best shot.

And he missed. Utterly. He wasn't just incoherent; he was positively boring, sniffling his way through bare-bones accounts of crimes committed by immigrants and vague references to people in CBP who support him. There's not even anything worth quoting as a particularly memorable lie; even his laughable claim that Democrats specifically asked for steel slats so they could support a wall just sounded perfunctory. There was just nothing. There was no exhibition of leadership to rally Republicans in Congress. There was no show of bravado to convince his base that The Donald is still breaking norms and making America great again. Trump gave the Democrats a national address during primetime (including on Fox, no less) and burned his ability to speak directly to the nation in future, and in return he got, in all probability, a collective national shrug. Behold the Art of the Deal, I guess.

[smjjames]

Yea, I was like 'Get to the point already!' about halfway through, hence my comment about whoever wrote it doesn't know how to write a good speech, or maybe it was hashed out in a hurry, but I suspect a good speechwriter would still make a better one if they were in a hurry. I think it would have been better if he wasn't following a script, or at least more entertaining.

As I also said, it sounded, if anything, like trying to build a case for doing a national emergency, which it could plausibly have been written down for in case he decided to do that, but he ended up not.

[PTTG??]

I think he misfired. He decided off the cuff to declare the emergency in a national announcement so nobody could contradict him. Then he changed his mind about declaring the emergency, perhaps because his entire staff begged him not to. Then, of course, he couldn't not have the national announcement...

[Hanslanda]

Are we watching Trump crash and burn? I hope so. I got popcorn reserved for this.

[wierd]

He has yet to go bananas on national television while dropping F-bombs and searing hate speech about Democrats, nor has he produced the apex of obscene twitter feeds yet.

[Hanslanda]

That would be a bang. This is more of a befuddled whimper.

[JoshuaFH]

I wish we could go back to the innocent halcyon days of presidents getting impeached for lying about BJ's.

[smjjames]

The dam has begun to crack. The article says that the wall will get punted to later, but there isn't going to be a later. If Trump can't extort a wall by using a shutdown, he's never going to get one.

If he and his staff are clever enough, maybe they can slip one into an infrastructure package.

[bloop_bleep]

I wish we could go back to the innocent halcyon days of presidents getting impeached for lying about BJ's.

Bill Clinton lied during testimony, which is far different than lying to the public at large.

[Trekkin]

Are we watching Trump crash and burn? I hope so. I got popcorn reserved for this.

Watch Trump's Twitter feed. He has perhaps two or three days to tweet his way out of a paradigm shift in the GOP's collective fear of his personal capacity to command the ire of his base before McConnell's calculus changes.

[EnigmaticHat]

Are we watching Trump crash and burn? I hope so. I got popcorn reserved for this.

As strong as my belief in Trump not facing consequences is, he and his people seem to think he's fucked.  So... yeah, we are.

He has two stakes in this.  The first is that the perception of him not doing anything is the only thing that causes him to lose support from his base.  But we're talking a very small drop, I don't think that matters as much as Trump thinks it does.

The more important issue is as long as this is going on its unlikely Mueller or the house intelligence committee is going to make any moves.  Which is almost certainly the reason Trump is doing this; he's desperate and figures he can't be charged with anything if the government is shutdown.  However this is a wildly immature view of things; there's no way he can shut down the government for the next two years, and the longer he waits the more pissed people are going to be, especially government employees.  His actions here make more sense when you realize that neither him nor his administration understood what a shutdown would mean.

Anyway, I'd take the popcorn out when this ends and the subpeonas come out.  That's what Trump is afraid of, the Dems producing even more scandal and then Mueller dropping a huge bombshell in the middle of it.

[Trekkin]

Trump may also just be desperately trying to keep this under the public radar.

In short: Manafort gave private polling data to Russian agents during the 2016 campaign, and Mueller feels confident he can prove that in court.

If you wanted a smocking gun regarding Russian collusion, this isn't quite it, but it's very close.

[Dunamisdeos]

Trump may also just be desperately trying to keep this under the public radar.

In short: Manafort gave private polling data to Russian agents during the 2016 campaign, and Mueller feels confident he can prove that in court.

If you wanted a smocking gun regarding Russian collusion, this isn't quite it, but it's very close.

nyuk nyuk nyuk

[Loud Whispers]

the smocking pun