Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Doubling down on nothing
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Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight: Trump Keeps Doubling Down On The Same Failed Strategy Indeed, the act of declaring a national emergency to build a wall is even more unpopular than the wall itself — and the wall isn’t popular. Polls as tracked by PollingRAbbreviated Pundit Round-up: Doubling down on nothing
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight: Trump Keeps Doubling Down On The Same Failed Strategy Indeed, the act of declaring a national emergency to build a wall is even more unpopular than the wall itself — and the wall isn’t popular. Polls as tracked by PollingReport.com show an average of 32 percent of Americans in favor of the declaration and 65 percent opposed. Even in an era where many of Trump’s top priorities poll only in the low-to-mid-40s, that’s an especially large split, with roughly twice as many voters opposed as in favor. Timothy O’Brien/Bloomberg: In Trump’s World, He Never Loses His Rose Garden speech declaring a national emergency and his decades of self-aggrandizement are more closely related than you might think. Back in the early 2000s, his casino company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, was in familiar territory: mismanaged, saddled with debt it had trouble repaying, and ultimately forced into bankruptcy. The enterprise had to be restructured, and Trump saw his stake in the company reduced. “I don’t think it’s a failure; it’s a success,” he told the Associated Press after his casinos filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2004. “It’s really just a technical thing.” None of that amounted to failure, he also assured me at the time, because he still had a (much smaller) ownership stake after the bankruptcy. “It’s a successful deal,” he told me. “You’ll never write that, but it’s a great deal.” "The only thing bad about it is I get some unsophisticated press that says, ‘Trump went into bankruptcy,’” he added. “Somehow the B-word [bankruptcy] never caught on very well in this country. But the smartest people in the country call me and say, ‘How the [expletive] did you pull that off?’” xRepublicans are now for asset forfeitures to fund eminent domain condemnation of private property by unilateral executive action.— Scott Shapiro (@scottjshapiro) February 17, 2019 Read more