Declaration of War?!

Well, it looks like it is now outright war between Trump and Nancy Pelosi after an apparently staged walkout by Trump from a WH meeting with congressional leaders over a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, apparently due to Trump’s inability and/or unwillingness to come up with the funding proposals he had promised to produce at their previous meeting. Acting chief of staff Mulvaney and probably congressional Republicans had obviously informed him that this was just not going to happen, and Trump had even sent a letter to Pelosi the previous night stating that he did not want to move ahead with infrastructure until after other things like approval of trade deals were done. Trump was very conveniently able to pin this all on Pelosi’s immediately preceding public comments that he was engaged in a cover-up. One has to wonder what excuse he would have used if she had not made those comments, or whether the meeting would have taken place but with no results. In any case, after walking out of the meeting, Trump announced to a Rose Garden press group, replete with a pre-made anti-Mueller propaganda sign on the podium, that he would not cooperate with Democrats on ANY legislation as long as congressional investigations are ongoing! Shades of the recent government shutdown! Since then, Trump and Pelosi have been seriously sniping at each other, and it seems clear that she knows exactly how to push Donald’s buttons! It has gotten personal and ugly on both sides. Trump has finally resorted to calling her Crazy Nancy, and has started attacking her personally, specifically her gestures and tendency to sometimes slur her speech, calling her “a mess” (shades of his mocking a disabled reporter during a campaign rally!). Trump and his henchman Giuliani have even both retweeted a doctored video clip from one of her recent public statements which augmented this slurring!! The Democrats are obviously not going to stop their investigations, so it seems inevitable that Trump will need to back down unless he wants to completely paralyze the government, which will not look too good for him, aside from his cult base. Of course, Trump’s surrogates and allies have predictably already been blaming Pelosi and the Democrats for all of this, and propping up Trump’s and Barr’s total fallacy of complete exoneration by the Mueller report. Although Pelosi is so far staying the course she has been advocating, Trump’s latest move does provide further impetus for many House Democrats to call for initiating an impeachment inquiry. I do agree with Pelosi that Trump is trying to goad the Democrats into impeachment, knowing that he would be acquitted by the Senate and thinking that he can use all this against them effectively in 2020, since he is such an expert at playing the victim. The Democrats can only benefit from this if they can succeed in swaying public opinion, which would depend on a lot of public congressional hearings and damaging revelations, hence the importance of overcoming administration stonewalling. Fortunately this week there have been two important initial lower court decisions against Trump regarding his financial records, but those are only the first rounds in a probably long judicial war, which will probably have to be fought for every subpoenaed record and official, a massive undertaking in itself! And there is the definite risk of public fatigue and boredom with all of this political warfare, which has already been setting in. Meanwhile the House has been passing lots of bills which are nearly all DOA in the Republican Senate and are getting very little press, thereby fueling Trump et al’s false narrative that the Dems aren’t doing anything but investigate him! The Dems need to talk about all of these bills at EVERY opportunity to counter this!!