Trump’s Fake National Emergency

John Cassidy: “Arguably, the most revealing exchange came when Peter Alexander, of NBC News, asked Trump to admit that the spending deal he was to sign later in the day gave him less money for his wall than he could have got before the government shutdown. Of course, Trump never admits anything. He insisted that he’d got ‘billions and billions of dollars for other things—port of entries, lots of different things’ from Congress. But, when it came to the wall, he went on, ‘they skimped.’ Then he added, ‘So I did—I was successful in that sense, but I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.'”

“It will be interesting to see what the courts make of Trump’s admission that, when it came time to declare a national emergency, he didn’t ‘need to do this.’ At the least, it was good to get it on the record from his own lips. Inside the Reagan Administration there used to be a saying: ‘Let Reagan be Reagan.’ In the Trump Administration such a statement would be entirely redundant. The President lets it all hang out: the incoherence, the fabrications, the mendacity, the raging but delicate ego, the attention-deficit disorder, and, occasionally, the revealing shards of self-illumination. He just can’t help himself.”