Amid the longest government shutdown in the country’s history, President Donald Trump may not win the battle over who’s to blame, argued The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech.
Last month, President Trump told Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he’d be “proud” to shut down the government over border security. On Monday, he took to Twitter and claimed that it was the Democrats fault.
However, in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 53 percent of Americans blame Trump and Republicans for the partial government shutdown while 29 percent blame Democrats. Only 13 percent say both are equally responsible.
On the Special Report “All-Star” panel Monday night, Domenech, along with Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt, and Georgetown Institute of Politics executive director Mo Elleithee all weighed on who the current state of the political showdown.
“I think the president needs to lean more into the argument about what the Democrats’ position really is, which is that they believe this wall is immoral because they now believe that borders are immoral or at least a significant portion of their base does. Put them in that position and lean into that argument more because I think this internal conventional wisdom question about who’s to blame for the shutdown he’s not going to win.”
Domenech began by expressing that the “Who’s to blame?” question regarding the shutdown is the “wrong question to be asking.”
“This is not about the money. This is about sending a message, a message in this case by the president to his base that ‘Yes, I am after two years of sort of not dealing with this promise, the biggest promise that I made, going to deal with this’ and the message from Democratic leadership to their base that they’re not going to show up in Washington and have their first act to be to bend over to this president on his signature issue,” Domenech told the panel.
“I think the president needs to lean more into the argument about what the Democrats’ position really is, which is that they believe this wall is immoral because they now believe that borders are immoral or at least a significant portion of their base does. Put them in that position and lean into that argument more because I think this internal conventional wisdom question about who’s to blame for the shutdown he’s not going to win.”
The Federalist publisher later added that there’s “no incentive” for the president to back down in this political battle and that it will take “a lot more time and a lot more pain” before both sides can compromise.
Mo Elleithee noted that Democrats are currently winning in the “PR wars” since most Americans are blaming Trump and the GOP that they’re sticking to their stance that the government must be reopened in order to move on with talks over the border.
Meanwhile, Chris Stirewalt told the panel that Republicans should have had a “tailor-made” response to Democrats who were vacationing in Puerto Rico last week amid the shutdown but that never happened and that their argument is getting repetitive.
“There are great avenues that Republicans could be following to keep the pressure on Democrats, but they do not. We hear the same thing over and over again. ‘There’s a crisis at the border. There’s a crisis at the border.’ And everybody agrees, but we’re still talking about the same thing,” Stirewalt said. “Democrats are at $1.6 billion, Republicans are at $5.7 billion, and no one has budged in either direction. The Republicans haven’t gone down, the Democrats haven’t gone up, and here we sit.”
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