In Trump's World, He Never Loses
His Rose Garden speech declaring a national emergency and his decades of self-aggrandizement are more closely related than you might think.
Hanging on a wall behind the omelet bar at President Donald Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida — where the commander in chief apparently stopped for a bite on Saturday after declaring a national emergency the day before — is an old, framed poster. It’s from an ad campaign Walgreens once ran featuring the president back when he was the sorcerer of “The Apprentice.”
In white block letters on the poster, next to a photo of Trump cocking his index finger at the camera and shouting in full “You’re fired!” mode, is a question: “CAN YOU WALK THE WALK?”
It’s likely that versions of this query still run through the president’s mind — and that he often finds himself coming up short, despite his public bravado and the loopy, ill-informed self-assurance he displays during pivotal moments such as his national emergency speech in the Rose Garden. That explains why he constantly spins his narratives toward success even in the face of obvious failures. To admit defeat is to admit he’s not walking the walk.
To that end, the White House released a document on Friday titled “President Donald Trump’s Border Security Victory” a day after Congress passed a spending bill that didn’t fund the border wall Trump demanded. The memo described the bill as a “legislative win” for Trump and outlined his intention to take executive action (and end-run Congress and the Constitution) by raising funds for the wall unilaterally.
It was inevitable that Trump would refuse to be stymied by Congress, and that he would take a victory lap regardless of what happened in the real world. In that context, his border-wall machinations are only partially about appeasing conservative pundits or his political base; for the most part, they’re about appeasing his sense of himself. He’s been doing this sort of thing his entire life: Spinning victory yarns from incontrovertible losses was a hallmark of his troubled business career.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-17/national-emergency-trump-has-no-intention-of-losing-on-the-wall
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