Nancy Pelosi Has the President Outmatched
Earlier this month, as is custom for the Speaker of the House to do, Nancy Pelosi formally invited the president to deliver his periodic State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress at the end of January. Today, with Trump's border wall shutdown in its fourth week, Nancy Pelosi took it back.
The proffered rationale for her decision is that States of the Union are the sort of high-risk, high-profile event that requires "the full resources of the Federal Government" in order to adequately prepare for it—and since the aforementioned federal government is shuttered and will remain that way for the foreseeable future, proceeding with business as usual presents too significant a security risk. This is reasonable enough. But her choice is also a savvy political move, because it prevents Donald Trump from hijacking this constitutionally-prescribed affair by taking to the House floor and shouting for 80 minutes about wall-hating, MS-13-loving liberals and nothing else. If he wants to keep telling the American people that Democrats are to blame for this debacle, he'll have to resort to Twitter to do it.
Really, though, Pelosi has outmaneuvering the president like this since the moment she took the gavel. Instead of engaging in the sort of petty public-relations sniping Trump adores, Pelosi has elected to focus on policy matters, repeatedly passing bills to re-open the government while still stumping for H.R. 1, the omnibus good-government bill to which House Democrats will turn next. By any metric, her agenda is working; more than half of Americans now blame Trump for the shutdown, and more Senate Republicans tiptoe away from the president's hard-line position with each passing day. This is true not only because her approach to making laws and running the country is better than his, but also because it has exposed the fact that he never had a coherent one in the first place.
Even on the one occasion when the shutdown fight spilled into the public eye—the president's primetime address last week—Pelosi's disciplined messaging strategy minimized the damage he might have caused had it occurred under the belated unified Republican government. While Trump framed the crisis in terms of the wall, she and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer made it about paying federal workers, cleaning up national parks, and sending out food stamps. For the first time during his presidency, Americans saw a clear alternative to the thing for which Trump was pushing at that moment.
During normal periods of government operation, perhaps an immigration-related policy dispute would resonate more strongly among certain sectors of the electorate. But Pelosi correctly deduced that when exasperated voters are stuck in airport security lines that snake across three terminals, even those who might otherwise buy in to this xenophobic vanity project are likelier to conclude that it just isn't worth the trouble.
Pelosi spent decades earning a reputation as a master legislator, so her ability to expose this president as an amateur doesn't come as a surprise. But after two years of watching the president do whatever he wanted while Paul Ryan pretended not to read the news, it is remarkable that Pelosi needed only a few weeks to tip the balance of power in Washington, depriving Trump's act of the oxygen on which it relies and slowly cleaving his party in two. At this point, he has no way out of this mess that isn't humiliating. All she has to do is wait for him to make a choice.
