I told you so

| 10:55 pm EST February 5, 2019
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There’s no automatic glory in being right; sometimes it’s more important to acknowledge when you were wrong, and learn from it. But when it comes to one particular news narrative about Donald Trump over the past month, I’m just going to say it, and for good reason: I told you so.

Donald Trump was never going to declare a national emergency during the State of the Union address in order to get his border wall. Such a declaration wouldn’t get him the funding at all, and it wouldn’t get him the land for years. The courts would strike the whole thing down anyway. It would paint Trump as impotent. It would backfire on him in every way possible. It would be such an obvious disaster for him, even he has the sense not to even try it.

But so many pundits on both of the political aisle have spent so much time lately obsessing over the prospect of Donald Trump declaring a national emergency to get his border wall, it’s been easy to forget that nothing works that way. There were people who went into tonight’s speech thinking that Trump might actually do it, because they’ve been hearing about it so breathlessly by so many people on cable news.

We went through the same thing when the TV pundits decided to obsessively try to convince us that Donald Trump was about to fire Robert Mueller, that he was about to magically pardon everyone, and other doomsday scenarios. None of these things were ever real; they were just ghost stories that scared people into staying tuned in, thus boosting ratings.

There are so many real Donald Trump schemes, crimes, disasters, and treacheries, we need to focus on those, so we can figure out how to properly fight back. Part of that requires ignoring the imaginary threats that simply aren’t real things, no matter how breathlessly the pundits keep whispering it in our ears. I told you Trump wouldn’t declare a national emergency tonight, because nothing works that way. Stop listening to the people who told you he would.