The writing on the wall, seen & noted.
On a cold Friday in the waning days of January the President of the United States showed some leadership. He put on a blue overcoat, straightened his long red tie, and stepped into the Rose Garden to end the month-long government shutdown he had staged to secure funding for a Trump-themed wall along the border with Mexico.
Lee at Appomattox, handing over his sword.
(Note to graduate students: somewhere in all this may be a Jim-dandy paper comparing the generalship of Nancy Pelosi with the generalship of Ulysses S. Grant — just waiting to be written).
I want to be optimistic about this moment and so I will. If I’m already proven wrong by the time you read this, well, even a breath of optimism can have a healing effect and right now I’ll take that.
It wasn’t quite the transcendent Christmas Morning giddiness of Ebenezer Scrooge after his midnight visitation by the three ghosts. But there was something in the president’s Rose Garden announcement we’ve not seen before. An acceptance of reality.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the president famous for ignoring his briefing papers so he can spend the morning watching TV has at long last read the writing on the wall.
It wasn’t pretty. The shutdown was crashing poll numbers for him and his party. The public was not buying his stories of evil migrant armies and vans full of duct-taped women being smuggled across the border. Not even the somber Oval Office address or big photo op in Texas had moved the needle. Federal workers were revealed as not the malevolent “deep state” of Trumpian fantasy, but rather a sympathetic group of overworked Americans struggling to live day-to-day just like the rest of us. Airplanes weren’t taking off at LaGuardia. Tax refunds weren’t getting in the mail. The latest indictments by Mr. Mueller had to be bringing some sweat to the presidential collar, with the unsettling prospect of a Trump wing in the federal penitentiary.
The cumulative effect was like an idiot light in the dashboard flashing brilliant red, saying if there was ever a moment to act more traditionally presidential this would be it. So we witnessed in the Rose Garden a normal presidential moment, notable only for its rarity.
What comes next in the optimistic scenario is our democracy functioning as the founding fathers intended. An actual debate in Congress over the nature of the problem at the border and how we might begin to solve it. Not so long ago I wrote a deeper communications analysis that suggests a change of tactics for Mr. Trump, and reading it may be instructive:
The alarmist bombast has failed — credit the “fool me once” axiom. The decision, conscious or not, to act as president of approximately one-third of the nation and assume everybody else will somehow fall into line has failed. If ending the government shutdown is a retreat, perhaps it can be a retreat toward the reality-based governance the nation is thirsty for.
Since I brought up Robert E. Lee, we might remind ourselves that his legacy includes not just his skill on the battlefield, but also the dignity of his surrender at Appomattox. Some honestly good ideas may rise from the coming debate. Embracing them isn’t a political defeat.
That’s the way out of the current governing condrum, and maybe it’s possible. As Hemingway wrote at the end of his book The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
