January 14, 2019, 12:05 am
President Trump’s address fell way short, and in no way countered Republican fecklessness.
Despite the fact that President Trump has fired almost every big gun he has, his battle with congressional Democrats over funding the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border has been stalemated. He will probably lose the fight.
The partial government shutdown, the longest ever, is in its fourth week. Despite his fondness for governance by Twitter, Trump made his first ever Oval Office speech on Tuesday night intending to rally Americans to his cause.
The speech lasted less than ten minutes, and in delivering it Trump’s performance was lackluster. He didn’t exhibit any of the passion and didn’t employ any of the heated rhetoric that dominated his 2016 campaign. The speech flopped because Trump failed to do the three things presidents do in every successful Oval Office address.
He didn’t announce a new government action that made news. He didn’t explain why the opposition was intransigent and wrongheaded in its refusal to go along with him. And he failed to rally the voters to support him by asking them to call their congressmen and senators to push hard for his border wall. (He didn’t even give out the Capitol switchboard number — 202-224-3121 — through which any senator’s or congressman’s office can be reached.)
more
https://spectator.org/democrats-big-lie-on-the-border-wall-but-theyre-winning/
