We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s analysis at The Washington Post on why Donald Trump is manufacturing a border crisis:
Trump is afraid of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the far-right echo chamber. (He sees Sean Hannity as more of a house pet.) He’s afraid of his shrunken but loyal base, which could abandon him if he doesn’t give them a wall. He’s afraid of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the federal, state and local prosecutors in New York who are investigating various Trump enterprises. And he’s afraid of losing his coercive hold over the Republican senators who one day could sit in judgment of his fate. Not one of these intertwined fears is irrational. Trump must realize he has painted himself into a corner but sees no alternative. According to news reports, the president knew his hostage-video Oval Office address on Tuesday and his photo op at the border on Thursday would make no difference. He must also be aware that the GOP leadership in Congress can’t hold the line forever.
Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic explains that Republicans are starting to squirm as Trump digs his heels in:
As President Donald Trump descends on the border Thursday to further make his case for a wall, back home in Washington congressional Republicans—the ones whose resolve he needs if he’s going to continue his shutdown campaign—are growing more anxious. While the images Trump broadcasts to the nation may bolster his case to his base, these Republicans are left to talk and share doubts among themselves. [...]
In a political world where government shutdowns have become commonplace, lawmakers from both parties have never quite been here before.
And pressure is mounting. Friday will mark the first day that federal workers won’t receive a paycheck. Transportation Security Administration agents have been calling out sick at higher rates since the shutdown began, and furloughed federal aviation-safety inspectors are holding up signs at airports warning passengers that their airplane might not have been properly inspected. If the shutdown continues after February, some 38 million American food-stamp recipients could be at risk of going hungry.
Here’s Fareed Zakaria at The New York Times on Trump’s manufactured crisis:
Watching the struggle over funding for a border wall, I am struck by the way in which, in one sense, President Trump has already achieved success. He has been able to conjure up a crisis out of thin air, elevate this manufactured emergency to national attention, paralyze the government and perhaps even invoke warlike authority and bypass Congress. He may still fail, but it should worry us that a president — any president — can do what Trump has done.
At New York magazine, Zak Cheney-Rice writes about how the wall was a scam from the start:
If there was any doubt that President Trump did not fully believe his own bombast about an immigration crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border, his comments to reporters on Wednesday in the Oval Office should put it to rest. During a press conference, Trump insisted on his “absolute right” to declare a “national emergency” to secure funds for a border wall — his signature campaign promise and the defining symbol of his national security ambitions. The Democrat-led House of Representatives has denied the president any of the $5.7 billion he is asking for, prompting him to shut down or defund roughly a quarter of the federal government and hold as hostage the paychecks of more than 800,000 workers. His obstinance is predicated on the assertion — repeated ad nauseum by himself and much of his administration — that undocumented immigration from Mexico and Central America poses an immediate threat to internal security, resulting in the free flow of terrorists and killers across the southern border.
Here’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Spencer Ackerman, Lachlan Markay, and Maxwell Tani
on Trump’s propaganda appearances and consultations with FOX’s Sean Hannity:
In a statement through a Fox News spokesperson, Hannity said he does not discuss potential private conversations with friends or sources, and would only consider questions if The Daily Beast revealed its sources.
On a final note, Frank Bruni urges the media to avoid the mistakes of 2016:
Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.
“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.
“When you cover this as spectacle,” Rather said, “what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” Spectacle is his métier. He’s indisputably spectacular. And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”