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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
He's twisting himself in knots to defend Trump on caving to Pelosi.
GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert: Trump Didn't Cave, This Is Just 'Round One'
Gohmert appeared on Fox News this afternoon and Kristin Fisher asked if POTUS “caved” to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as some conservative commentators have said.
“No, I don’t think that he’s caved to Speaker Pelosi,” Gohmert responded. “This is round one of a, you know, 12-round bout, maybe 15. And this is a very strategic move on the president’s part.”
But at one point Fisher played comments Gohmert made on Fox News recently, in which he said Trump should keep the government closed “till hell freezes over.” And she again asked if he’s standing by Trump’s decision:
FISHER: I just want to be clear here. You are standing by President Trump’s decision yesterday to reopen the government without any wall funding.
GOHMERT: Well, this is a recess, it is not––yeah, I would have preferred that he just keep the… well, it’s the Democrats, they…
FISHER: You would have preferred if he just kept the government shut down?
GOHMERT: Well, yeah. Because––look, I was visiting with our border patrolmen, with TSA people, and they don’t want us––they can’t say it publicly––but they have said, “Look, we’re getting by.” Except for the VA, the Veterans Administration was screwing over TSA and other officials who were not getting paid. But everybody else was working with them, and they were saying, “Look, this is really hurting me, my family, but we know how badly we need a wall. If this is the sacrifice it takes to get a wall, then keep the government closed.”
Trump’s golf course employed undocumented workers — and then fired them amid showdown over border wall About a dozen employees, some of whom had worked at a Trump golf course in New York for years, were let go Jan. 18.
Trump Meets With Hard-Right Group Led by Ginni Thomas – At the meeting, which was unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice and a president, the activists denounced women serving in the military and questioned the administration’s hiring.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/politics/trump-ginni-thomas-meeting.html
Inside the White House, aides and advisers are despondent over a wasted month
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/26/politics/white-house-aides-despondent/index.html
Instead of emerging victorious, many of Trump's allies are walking away from a record-breaking government shutdown feeling outplayed, not least by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The President is now more unpopular than he was before the shutdown began, sacked with blame for the 35-day lapse in funding.
Friday's announcement was an extraordinary comedown that left many in the White House and those who support Trump marveling at the futility of the preceding four weeks of brinkmanship. In the eyes of some aides and outside advisers, an entire fruitless month has passed that cannot be recouped, a waste of the most valuable asset a White House has: the President's attention and time.
"A humiliating loss for a man that rarely loses," one Trump adviser said. "I miss winning."
Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 26th 2019 at 7:52:29 AM
This was more than a couple pages ago but quick response:
What? I was just addressing that we should give credit to furloughed employees actually starting to use unions to their advantage for ending the shutdown rather than giving all the credit to the Democrats. Like, seriously, I don't understand where you're getting all that from, but I'm not trying to be some hyper-pessimist toward Democrat achievements. I just wanna give credit where credit is due, and it's really nice to see unions (or even just murmurs of unions) hold some power within this country for once.
Obviously the shutdown would've ended in Trump's favor if the Democrats had caved, but what specifically ended the shutdown wasn't specifically Democrat actions. That was my original point, apologies if it got a bit muddled.
Edited by golgothasArisen on Jan 26th 2019 at 1:52:05 PM
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"
Let's look at what your post said;
Whatever your intention was as written your statement is absolutely dismissive of what the democrats did. Especially since there is no evidence that was specifically what has ended the shutdown for now. To say as such would be to ignore the Democrats presenting a unified front (with one exception but only when it didn't matter), that the public are blaming Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown, and Republicans starting to vote against Trump's wishes along with many other factors. Pointing to just one thing and saying "this is what really did it" is foolish at best.
What I was saying there was that if you actually look at what was changing that directly correlated with causing the end of the shutdown, it was the beginning of protests by federal employees that most likely caused the end of the shutdown. I mean, that's not just my opinion, news outlets have run pieces discussing the same exact thing. I'm not denying that the Democrats weren't a major help here, but I want to point out that the workers unionizing was extremely important, and - let's be fair here - pretty big news.
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"Correlation does not equal causation. Where is your evidence that had there not been federal employees protesting Trump would have remained firm on the shutdown? Or to put it another way, that this wasn't just the straw that broke the camel's back (and could have been substituted by something else with the same result) or came after Trump had already caved but before he made it official?
So I reiterate that it's foolish to believe that it was federal workers protesting specifically that ended the shutdown over it being the latest in a long series of events that eroded Trump's will to continue.
Wait, but I am literally saying it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm stating that this is demonstrating that unions are actually holding some weight for once by being that final action to cause Trump to cave. I feel like you're misunderstanding?
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"If that was your intention you weren't conveying it clearly. Saying "what actually ended the shutdown was this" implies that it was that specific thing (the threat of protesting by unions) that was the deciding factor rather than it being the sum of all parts (Democrats united, Republicans defecting, population blaming Trump for shutdown, etc).
Well, again, apologies for not being very clear. I do have problems with that, and I wanna try to get better at it in the future. Regardless, I believe that what's most important now is to see what Trump and the Democrats do in the next three weeks. After all, it can't be forgotten that this is just a temporary end.
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"True enough. I can see the Democrats caving to support more money for border security initiatives that don't involve the wall, stuff like more boots on the ground, drones to patrol parts of the border, increased screening on vehicles coming in to crack down on smuggling through legal crossings, etc. The only question is how fixated Trump is on the wall itself.
You would think that at some point, Trump would realize that most illegal immigrants come by plane (as do most drugs smuggled into the country), but no he really is that stupid. And blatantly racist.
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"It's hard to tell with Trump.
Is he so stupid that he really isn't aware that the wall won't do anything?
Has anyone actually tried telling him?
If people have told him, has he willfully remained ignorant and brushed aside their facts as "fake news"?
Or does he just not care about border security at all, and the wall is literally only a monument to his manhood?
Or does he not even care about the wall at all, and the only reason he keeps arguing for it is because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy?
I feel people keep trying to separate the real estate con man from the Wall. Which is ridiculous. Trump supports the Wall because it's a big, easy, symbolic construction project he can sell to metaphorical investors (voters) and literal investors.
Like all of his shitty construction projects, it doesn't actually need to work and probably would but people just need to believe it would.
And bam, he achieves his aim.
The Wall got Trump elected and it never had to work because it's an easy concept to sell to people, like "Give 350 million pounds to the National Health Care system."
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 27th 2019 at 3:06:27 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I get the impression that he wants some sort of monument for himself. And since he can hardly order people to put his face on Mount Rushmore (though I don't doubt that he would try if he could) the wall is it.
Just shows how clueless Trump truly is when it comes to building projects. Effectivity and cost aside, even if the money were released now, it is highly unlikely that anything substantial would have been build by the time he leaves office.

Definitely an improvement in the jawline.