Three strikes and you’re an idiot

| 9:09 am EST January 20, 2019
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Strike three. For the third time in ten days, Donald Trump announced that he was going to make a high profile announcement about his government shutdown and his border wall demands. For the third time, he dropped hints that he was going to take drastic action. And for the third time, he ended up corralling the nation’s attention just so he could say little that was new or of consequence.

Three strikes and you’re out. That’s how it works in baseball. You can keep fouling off as many pitches as you like. But if you start taking swings, you start running out of chances. If you swing the bat halfway around before pulling back because you weren’t really planning to hit the ball anyway, that counts as a strike just the same – and those watching it at home see it as an annoying waste.

In politics, the saying might be something closer to three strikes and you’re doing it wrong. If Donald Trump had something new to say, a new argument that might actually change any minds, a new compromise offer that might actually be seen as legitimate, it would be one thing. But Trump keeps grabbing the mic and forcing everyone to listen as he repeatedly reveals that he’s a one-trick pony. If his gambit doesn’t initially work, he lacks the imagination or the savvy to figure out how to come up with a better gambit.

We’ll see what happens. But now that Donald Trump has tepidly half-swung and fully missed three times in a row on the same issue, people are going to start tuning him out on this issue altogether. That’ll leave him with even less leverage than he already has, which is virtually none. And he can’t simply walk away on this issue, because he’s already married his fate to it by shutting down the government over it. Three strikes and you’re an idiot.