Donald Trump throws a pity party at Camp David and no one shows up
“President” Donald Trump announced that on Sunday, January 6, 2019, he would hold a meeting at Camp David with his White House staff to discuss border security and other items. However, the list of people who are not there raises questions about who might be there, and what exactly the purpose is for this meeting, other than for Trump to get out of the White House for the day.
According to reports, Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will not be visiting. They will remain back to purportedly continue negotiating with Congress to end the shutdown that might soon be the longest in government history, and is the first one where the GOP, the “fiscally conservative” party, is maintaining a shutdown because it seeks additional spending.
In the meantime, Trump’s favorite propaganda machine, Fox News, is chipping away at Nielsen’s and Trump’s fake reporting of terrorists caught at the border. Chris Wallace, on Fox News Sunday, pushed back against Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ claims of 4,000 terrorists caught at the border. When she raised the bogus claim that had been in Nielsen’s slide deck, Wallace responded: “Airports. The state department says there hasn’t been any terrorists found coming across the southern border.”
Terrorists crossing the southern border is a central theme of the false “national emergency” that Donald Trump is considering declaring so he can build the wall. (As has been reported in Palmer Report, Trump is wrong in his understanding how this works as well.) Maybe this meeting is for Trump to consider the next poster in his mimicking of Game of Thrones. Without Pence, Nielsen and Kushner at the meeting, nothing of substance likely will be discussed. Although with a “President” claiming that past presidents have given him support for the wall (all have denied), perhaps he is sitting in front of a mirror at Camp David, doing a Stuart Smalley session with his “senior staff.”
Daniel is a lawyer writing and teaching about SCOTUS, and is the author of the book “The Chief Justices” about the SCOTUS as seen through the center seat.