Mitch McConnell was nowhere to be seen during the last few WH pressers about the government shutdown.Trump burned him and Senate Republicans after caving to right-wing talk radio, explained Fox News' Chris Wallace.
That's what's really going on here.
Trump has closed the government — after striking a bipartisan CR deal in December — because his fee fees can't handle criticism from Rush Limbaugh and those like him on Fox News. Hundreds of thousands of American workers are not getting paid because of a buffoon's ego. Not because of funding for a concrete wall.
He's a coward.
On Friday's Shepard Smith Reports, guest host Trace Gallagher had Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace on to discuss Trump's shutdown, and wondered where Leader McConnell had gone.
Trace said, "At the news conference, the president was asked where was Mitch McConnell, and he said, 'Look, Mitch McConnell is a very busy guy, but he's a pivotal guy in this whole shut down thing. Historically as you go back, Mitch McConnell was always the guy to get the government up and running again.'"
Wallace replied, "Here's the problem for Mitch McConnell. If you remember, just before the shutdown started, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans and the Senate got what they thought was a go-ahead from the White House that you put through a continuing resolution to fund all of the government until February, and the president will sign it, and so the House overwhelmingly passed it."
He continued, "Then the president got hammered by right-wing talk radio, by the House Freedom Caucus, and if you remember he switched his mind and said, 'no, I won't go for that. I'm going to insist on the $5.6 billion. I won't sign the continuing resolution,' and McConnell and the Senate Republicans felt really burned by that."
Wallace said McConnell is "not going to be in another situation where he goes out and sticks his neck out next to the members, his Republican members, out until he knows that the president is on the record — and publicly — that he will sign whatever the deal is."
Wallace continued, "Mitch McConnell has said, 'I'm out of this fight.' There doesn't seem to be anybody in the White House right now who House Democrats trust, maybe even Senate Republicans trust, to speak for the president. They're going to want to hear the president on the record say, 'I will accept this,' before they go with it."
Nobody in Congress trusts Trump.
Trump has agreed to deals in Congress before and then after getting some right wing criticism, he reneges. That's his pattern. He's not in charge, the extremists are. Trump has also caved on matters of U.S. foreign policy to murderous dictators as well, i.e., pulling troops out of Syria because Erdogan told him to.
Democrats need to hammer home that there was a bipartisan deal to keep the government open — one that Trump agreed to and then refused after Limbaugh took him to the woodshed. He made it political.
That's not leadership or deal making. That's cowardice.
