OPINION:
Here’s one thing we learned from the recent Trump-Pelosi scrum on funding the border wall: President Trump played shutdown politics far better than some of his talk-show kibbitzers and those seemingless clueless Republican conferees who permitted those anti-border control provisions to slip into the “compromise” spending bill that reached the president’s desk.
The truth is that Mr. Trump decided to close the government down to prove that he was serious about the wall and the border security issue. But when it became clear that the chief executive was being crushed in the polls the longer the shutdown dragged on, the president tossed in the towel after 35 days, even though conservative icon Rush Limbaugh, normally on target, was suggesting shutdowns work like a charm for the GOP.
“Does somebody want to tell me the government shutdown hurt Trump? It never does! It never does hurt Republicans. Republicans have yet to learn this,” he told listeners on Feb. 11. But that’s not what the statistics show. Real Clear Politics (RCP), which averages the president’s job approval rating from major polling firms, reveals that the president’s popularity steadily plummeted through the shutdown and didn’t recover until he delivered his State of the Union address.
Mark LaRochelle, a keen analyst of statistics, informs this column that the RCP poll averages show that “Trump’s job approval rating was 9.3 points lower than his disapproval rating on December 21, 2018, the day before the shutdown started. When the shutdown ended on January 25, Trump’s approval rating was now 11.5 points under water.”
But the shutdown was so harmful that even its demise didn’t stop the bleeding, with Mr. Trump’s approval rating having fallen 14.4 points behind his disapproval numbers on Feb. 4, 10 days after the shutdown and the day before his State of the Union message. The spread between his approval and disapproval rating had swollen by an alarming 50 percent since the start of the shutdown.
Even Rasmussen, whose numbers are normally friendlier to Mr. Trump than other polling firms, showed the president’s ratings, hardly helped by delayed flights and stressed out air traffic controllers, did not rebound until he was bathing in the glow of his splendid speech before the Congress.
When Mr. Trump ended the shutdown, the initial reaction from across the ideological spectrum was that the Queen of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had cleaned Donald Trump’s clock. But the president had a Hail Mary pass in mind. He gambled that he could shift public opinion with his joint address, which, in fact, miraculously occurred.
CBS News reported that 76 percent of those who tuned into the president’s address on its network overwhelmingly approved the speech, revealing that Mr. Trump had connected with an audience far greater than the 43 percent of Republican viewers. While only 30 percent of Democrats liked it, 97 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of independents were in the president’s corner.
And he had made the case for a tough line on immigration. “From what they heard tonight,” CBS conceded, “71 percent of speech-watchers think there is a crisis at the southern border.” The CBS survey matched other network numbers as well. Within a week of the speech, Rasmussen handed Mr. Trump its highest positive ratings since the shutdown ended—52 percent approval. The president was on a roll.
What happened next proved inexplicable. When the shutdown ended, Congress appointed 17 members of the House and Senate to devise a bipartisan compromise that would keep the government running on a long-term basis. But what emerged drew howls of rage from border security backers.
The “compromise” not only slashed Mr. Trump’s wall request by 75 percent, but allowed the fencing to be built only in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas where local governments, controlled by Democrats, would, in the words of respected expert on illegal immigration, Mark Krikorian, “have an effective veto over whether barriers would be constructed.” Mr. Krikorian also insisted the areas listed in the legislation prohibiting border barriers in South Texas were so extensive that “the 55 miles of new fencing might never get built at all.” And this was only a small number of lethal, anti-border landmines uncovered by experts.
The burning question is: How did the Republicans on this 17-member conference committee allow this kind of language to stay in the final measure? Mr. Krikorian suggests a partial answer: Tom Graves, Georgia Republican, a member of the committee, “refused to sign the report because he wasn’t permitted even to see the text until after midnight this morning [Feb. 14] and was given an hour to read the whole thing and decide.”
If nothing else the committee Republicans — names listed below — have some explaining to do. It is quite possible if they had held out for a bit more money and weeded out some of these poison pills, Trump wouldn’t have had to declare a national emergency, watch Republicans fight over its constitutionality and rely on courts to uphold the president’s power to protect the borders.
The four Republican senators on the panel: Richard Shelby of Alabama, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, John Hoeven of North Dakota, Roy Blunt of Missouri.
The four House Republicans: Kay Granger of Texas, Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, Tom Graves of Georgia and Steven Palazzo of Mississippi.
* Allan H. Ryskind was a longtime editor and owner of Human Events. His latest book is “Hollywood Traitors” (Regnery, 2015).
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