Did Trump win with that wall speech? Sure as heck, he did
Rivers of commentary in the wake of President Trump's wall speech Tuesday are flowing with "analysis" that Trump lost the battle, and his congressional opponents, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, now have the upper hand. There's talk of Republicans caving and warnings that the public blames Trump for the shutdown.
The real indicators, however, tell a different story.
Number one: Twitter went hog wild, making fun of Pelosi's and Schumer's weird-looking appearance in their public rebuttal to President Trump's argument. They could have done nothing, as would have been normal for legislative opponents for a presidential speech, but they couldn't stand the idea of President Trump getting that camera time. They demanded, and got, airtime, too, presumably to flip the "narrative" by making President Trump appear "heartless," and having the last word to boot.
It blew up in their faces.
First Twitter's denizens made fun of their sepulchral appearance by characterizing them as Bond villains, American Gothic, those evil twins from "The Shining," Mom and Dad having that little talk with you, and the Addams Family.
Your father and I aren't angry with you, just ... disappointed. pic.twitter.com/RZKC6SxkFe
— jon gabriel (@exjon) January 9, 2019
When you think you can sneak into the house after staying out too late, but Mom & Dad are up waiting for you in the living room pic.twitter.com/TOqINd1DaP
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 9, 2019
That was signal enough, but it got worse when the mainstream media couldn't resist reporting it, stringing together memes that, frankly, were hilarious. I'm talking not Fox News or the Daily Mail here, but some of the left's finest tools – CBS, Newsweek, USA Today, the Washington Post, lefty organs always against Trump, that went to town. Only the HuffPo tried to defend the pair. The more mainstream publications and nets simply couldn't resist running whole stories, complete with choice streams of memes, for fruit this low-hanging, given the traffic it meant. Obviously, something was going on.
It got worse still when late-night comedy, that leftist bastion of bastions, weighed in. Take a look: lefty Colbert is out there making fun of Pelosi and Schumer as hopelessly "old," and he didn't even run the most unflattering pictures:
The Daily Show weighed in, making them figures of fun, too.
It's noteworthy that Schumer and Pelosi knew that their performance was a bomb, as Thomas Lifson noted here, and that recognition signals that they know that it set their argument back.
That would explain their second, hastily cobbled together press conference the following day, with overpaid union members complaining about their still not withheld paychecks based on the shutdown, which broke up the weird images of the two of them at one podium with all those American flags behind them earlier. They were obviously trying to supersede those damnable pictures in the press with some new ones that didn't make them look so freakish. They knew they had a public relations disaster on their hands. All it tells us now is that they are feeling the heat and are on their back foot.
The score? Trump: 1. Pelosi and Schumer, 0.