TRUMP IS LEARNING, THERE’S NOTHING HE CAN DO TO STOP PELOSI

…The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in her 2^nd term as Speaker

The president has no clue as to how to attack Pelosi, “strategically”….?

Our president, who has no concept of being “strategic”, his normal mode is to only think of the here-and-now and he is really up against a professional when he takes on Nancy Pelosi.

In her first role as the House Speaker, many congressional scholars agree that Pelosi was among the most effective House Speakers in modern history. She masterfully engineered the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, grabbing an opportunity that she knew might never come again, even though she knew it was likely to cost the Democrats their House majority, which it did for a few years.

All of this has not come without a price that Pelosi’s adversaries have made caricatures of her and they continue to demonize her,  Some of her allies have even dismissed her and in former polls they had negative feelings about her that often exceeded the positive ones by more than 25 points.  The then 2018 speaker-in-waiting found herself the target of what she had personally estimated were as many as 137,000 Republican campaign ads.

But lately, Pelosi has been able to unnerve President Trump as seemingly no one else can.

It was brilliant when Pelosi said: ““I pray for the president of the United States,” she said on Thursday. “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he [Trump] wants to take a leave of absence.”

The proof that she had hit the giant bull’s eye of Trump’s glaring insecurities was his response: “I am an extremely stable genius.”

Trading insults with this president is normally unproductive, as many others have found.  But Pelosi is dangerous  for a president who only operates on impulse, outburst and falsehoods. While Trump succeeds in making everyone else around him totally bewildered, Pelosi’s real talent is her ability to keep the focus on her endgame.  

That being, the goal to assure that this president vacates the Oval Office, as swiftly and as surely as possible.

In that effort, the Speaker has two needs to fulfill:

First, to continue to keep the president off-balance with her comments that requires Trump to have to respond.

The second issue, is to restrain those in her Democratic caucus to hold-off in their derive to impeach the president, until the time is right.  Let the investigations do their duty and get past Trump’s efforts to keep them from getting the evidence they need.

Pelosi knows that the only way to actually impeach the president is to get both houses to have bipartisan support for impeaching the president.

Back in the getting President Nixon to volunteer to leave office, that occurred when Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater went to see the president, right after John Dean’s televised testimony and the releasing of the secret White House tapes.  Goldwater went to tell the president that he no longer had the support of the Republican Senate, and that he would be the first president to be impeached by both houses of Congress.

Pelosi knows that unless there is that overwhelming bipartisan support, the effort would end with Trump’s acquittal in the Senate.  That would possibly help him win another four years in office.  Pelosi said, “He wants to be impeached now, so he can be exonerated by the Senate,” she told this to top Democrats in a private meeting. “His actions are villainous to the Constitution of the United States.”

Therefore, she is taking another course.  She is asking to continue congressional oversight while relying on the courts to provide cover as six different House Committees seek documents and testimony from a stonewalling administration.  

This is not as positive for those who are currently eager to begin impeachment proceedings, and those who argue that anything less than impeachment is a dereliction of Congress’s duty to hold Trump accountable. 

It is important that the Democratic caucus trusts Pelosi’s instincts and experience, and to follow her directions.

That's because, Pelosi is everything that Trump isn’t.

Pelosi has shown patience, discipline and she is resilient, just because she has had to be.

No woman in US history has ever risen to a more powerful office in government than the one in which Pelosi now sits, and she does it for a second time.

Much of the negatives that have been thrown at Pelosi is blatant sexism, including the mocking of her looks and her demeanor.  But she has not been rattled by any of it.  Where Trump explodes if a fellow Republican says a word of criticism about Trump, Pelosi lets it be known that during the 2018 midterm elections, if any Democratic candidates felt it would be politically advantageous to distance themselves from her, she told them they should “go right ahead”.

Pelosi regained the speaker’s gavel by doing what it took to win in congressional districts where she, and her liberal party, are not popular. Those are the seats Pelosi knows she must protect in 20

Her strategy is for keeping one foot on the congressional oversight accelerator, while braking the efforts on impeachment, and that effort is winning.

And that strategy is getting to a president that has no clue on how to attack that effort strategically.

All Trump knows is to give his competitors nicknames and to counter-punch at whatever they serve up.

The prospect of this unending scrutiny is seriously getting to Trump.  He recently, abruptly blew up a meeting that had been scheduled with Pelosi and other congressional leaders to negotiate on the nation’s infrastructure package.

He stalked out to the Rose Garden to whine that he could not work with Democrats unless they drop what he called “these phony investigations.”

Then he bristled at Pelosi’s characterization of that aborted infrastructure meeting as being a Trump “temper tantrum”.   The president then pressed five different White House aides to attest he had been “calm” in his three-minute blow-up of the infrastructure session with the lawmakers.  However, the five aides sounded like they were just reciting what the president told them to say, as they all used the same words to describe Trump’s “calm” nature during the blow-up.

Things are so bad at the White House, they even stooped so low as to circulating doctored and heavily edited videos suggesting that Pelosi’s mental stability is what should be questioned. “I’ve been watching her [Pelosi] for a long period of time. She’s not the same person,” Trump said.

But the reality is that Pelosi is exactly who she has always been.

What’s changed is that Trump is beginning to understand what Pelosi means to his presidency, and there’s nothing he can do to stop her .

Copyright G. Ater 2019