GUESS WHO HAS BECOME THE ”CAVER-IN-CHIEF?”

…Speaker Pelosi: a woman who doesn’t “cave”

Trump continues to put himself into “no-win situations”.

I have for some time been calling President Trump the “Liar-in-Chief”!  But now our president has earned a new nick-name.  President Donald J. Trump is the “Caver-in-Chief”!

Trump either lies about things that others are required to explain the real truth, or he takes a position on a subject, and then has to change his position or he “just caves”.

As the latest obvious example, in a period of one single 24-hour day, the “Caver-in Chief” went from the “Government is staying closed”, to “I will sign the bill that will open the Government.” 

Trump had for weeks insisted publicly that he would never cave on the shut-down, but privately he was saying that he was being “crushed.”

The founder and CEO of the successful polling operation: FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, he noted as much in analyzing Trump’s shutdown reversal: “Trump has no sense for which battles to pick and seemingly little awareness of his own unpopularity and the consequences it has for the presidency. Moreover, although Trump sometimes seems to realize when he has gotten himself into a no-win position, he doesn’t recognize how often his own decisions are responsible for putting him there [in the first place].”

Here are just a few examples of our “Caver-in-Chief” and our “Liar-in Chief”.

• Trump threatened to close the Southern Border, then reversed himself when he realized that would stop all of the commercial business with a major supplying nation to the US.

• Trump had said he would stop the war in Afghanistan, but later caved and decided to leave the US troops stationed there.

• Troop said after a meeting with leader Kim Jong Un, there was no further nuclear threat from North Korea.  That has been found to be a false statement by the leaders of the FBI, CIA and NSA.

• Trump continues to threaten to leave NATO, but is being stopped by others in his administration and in Congress.

• Trump promised a giant Military Parade in the Nation’s Capital, but had to back down because he hadn’t considered the millions it would cost and the damage that the tanks and equipment would do the capital’s streets.

• Trump ordered the family separation at the Southern Border, then had to back down when Trump’s officials hadn’t done their home-work and weren’t able to identify who were the separated children’s parents.

• Trump has said that ISIS has been beaten.  The officials at the Pentagon and many US Senators have stated that Trump is totally wrong.

• Trump vowed to “Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA)”.  But that fell apart because Trump’s Republican team hadn’t developed any replacement for the ACA.

• Trump had promised his supporters that the nation’s broken infrastructure would be one of the first items on his list.  Two years in to his presidency, nothing done on infrastructure.

• At a meeting with Russia’s leader, Putin, Trump said there was no reason that Russia would have been the ones that hacked and interfered with the 2016 election.  Then Trump had to reverse himself.

As Trump continues to tout his deal-making strength, many indicators point to a very weak president failing to develop a real agenda; to take consistent well-thought out positions; or to build any real consensus.

This has made negotiating with Trump difficult for both Democrats and Republicans.  But if you consider Nate Silver’s poker analogy, it made the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s shutdown negotiations with Trump that much easier.

As the conservative Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said to Politico of Speaker Pelosi, after the shutdown ended: “She’s not one to bluff.”  

That’s because Speaker Pelosi doesn’t cave.

Copyright G. Ater 2019