Why Did Trump Take So Long to Fold on the Shutdown?

Watching President Trump stumble his way through the shutdown, with his poll numbers declining as Speaker Nancy Pelosi treats him like a lead-footed sparring partner, it’s hard to remember that this was a setback entirely of his own making. Why, with a bipartisan deal ready to sail through Congress in December, did he make “the wall” not just a point of negotiation, but the central cause of his next two years? How did he manage to trap himself into being held hostage by the most intransigent of his supporters, causing massive suffering among government workers, and serious threats to everything from public safety to the national economy? Why did wait a month to accept a deal to open the government—without new funds for a border wall—that was on the table last year? If you’re into armchair psychoanalysis, you could note—as his biographers have written— that for Trump, acknowledging error is more or less impossible. But it would be a mistake to see this as simply the latest demonstration of the President’s uniqueness as a politician. Rather, his display of willful blindness is a fresh reminder of one of the most enduring—though hardly endearing—traits of political leaders: the inability to acknowledge error, even when the perils of continuing down a dangerous path become obvious. Maybe the shutdown is Trump’s Brexit. Two and a half years after narrowly voting to extricate itself from the European Union, Britain finds itself two months away from a breakup that shows every sign of triggering a social and economic catastrophe. Every promise made by the Brexiteers—hundreds of millions of pounds suddenly showering down on the populace, a smooth transition that would not disrupt trade with the Continent—have been shown to be a product of delusion or prevarication. The government’s plan went down to defeat by one of the largest margins ever suffered by a ruling party, one that remains in power only because Labour leader Jeremy Corbin has steadfastly refused to produce anything remotely resembling a plan—other than his own ascension to power. The response to this predicament would seem clear: a forthright assertion by Prime Minister May that, seeing clearly what a disaster exit would be, let the people decide whether to remain in the European Union after all. Such a vote would be roughly equivalent to a busload of passengers saying, ‘Now that we see we are headed off a cliff, it’s clear we took a wrong turn and we want you to turn back.” But that’s not what May is saying. Rather, she asserts that a new vote “would do irreparable damage to the integrity our politics, because it would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver.” Or maybe it’s Trump’s Vietnam. Half a century ago, when the war was taking 500 American (and countless Vietnamese) lives a week, and when “quagmire” had become a cliché, a popular song captured the reckless pursuit of an increasingly elusive victory. “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” by Pete Seeger, describes a World War II training mission in which a thick-headed captain orders his platoon to ford a river even as his sergeant tells him of the danger. “We were waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on,” the chorus goes. Eventually, the captain drowns, the platoon escapes and—just in case the Vietnam analogy wasn’t clear enough—the narrator says: “Every time I read the papers/That old feeling comes on/We’re, waist deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on.” The real story of Vietnam, however, was even more chilling. President Johnson was fully aware of the futility of the war. In a telephone call on May 27, 1964 with Senator Richard Russell, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the two men despaired of what was happening in Southeast Asia. The two men agreed that the situation was “a mess,” that there was no prospect of “victory” in any real sense of the term, and that there was no strategic value in remaining there. Russell wished for a Saigon government that would ask us to leave; LBJ worried about the political cost of “losing” Vietnam. In the years to come, LBJ would—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes aggressively—escalate the conflict. Russell would be one of the most hawkish voices in the senate, urging more troops, more firepower. Unlike the clueless captain in Seeger’s song, they knew that wading into the Big Muddy would likely lead to disaster. They just couldn’t fathom saying that to the American public. They were not the only leaders who felt that way: All through the last year of his life, President John F. Kennedy made two arguments in private: that committing ground forces in Asia was folly, and that he could do nothing about that pitfall until after he was re-elected in 1964. Fifty years later, the shutdown is not the only quagmire our political leaders refuse to wade out of. We have been in a war in Afghanistan for some 17 years, pursuing the delusion that we can someday leave a stable, functioning Afghan government in place. We have been waging a “war on drugs” for longer, refusing to acknowledge that the appetite in the United States for these drugs pours tens of billions of dollars every year into the pockets of the cartels and the military and governmental leaders who protect them. No one like to admit mistakes. A host of social science studies talk about “confirmation bias,” and some even show that people don’t change their minds when presented with evidence of a strongly held belief—instead, they believe even more strongly in the falsehood. Confessing error can also erode self-confidence: A study, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found that “people who refused to apologize after a mistake had more self-esteem and felt more in control and powerful than those who did not refuse.” When President George H.W. Bush apologized to his Republican Party for breaking his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, it helped protect his 1992 opponent, Bill Clinton, from charges of inconsistency. More broadly, the presidency is a tough enough job without coping with self-doubt. That may be why another Bush (George W.), when asked to identify a single mistake in his first term, could not think of a single misstep. There are good reasons for resisting doubts about a political course. If you’re the leader of your party, you’ve rallied allies behind your idea, either out of conviction or party loyalty. They’ve spoken on behalf of your ideas and defended them at town halls, on TV, on the floor of the House and Senate. If you then say to the country, “I was wrong, and we’re changing course,” you are likely to cause serious problems for your own side. Still, one of the most striking exceptions to presidential obstinance came from the Great Communicator himself. When his administration was threatened by reports that it had traded arms for hostages, and then funded the anti-Sandinista “contras” in Nicaragua, Ronald Reagan said this in a nationally televised speech: “I take full responsibility for my own actions and those of my administration. … This happened on my watch.” He added, “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” And he even said, “There are reasons why it happened but no excuses. It was a mistake.” That frank statement happened at the end of an investigation. And it did not involve, for example telling the families of soldiers who died in a conflict that the war was no longer worth fighting. It did not involve telling millions of people who voted to leave a multinational union that the promises behind such a vote were essentially fraudulent. It did not involve telling hundreds of thousands of people who are going without paychecks that you’re settling for a deal that you could have gotten weeks ago. So yes, the cost of changing course for Trump could be steep, even politically fatal. But so could the cost of wading further into the Big Muddy. Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine Source: https://politi.co/2WrMEiC Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you. The Article Was Written/Published By: Jeff Greenfield ! #Headlines, #BorderWall, #Political, #Shutdown, #Trending, #Trump, #News, #Newsfeed http://bit.ly/2G1BlrG
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