Like so many presidents before him came to understand, the power of the bully pulpit is vastly overrated.
Over the past week, President Donald Trump has pulled out all the stops to seize the upper hand in the ongoing government shutdown fight. He’s made his case in a prime-time Oval Office address. He’s flown to McAllen, Texas, the site of his much desired border wall — where he met with border patrol agents and vowed, “The buck stops with everybody.” He called a meeting with top Democratic lawmakers, only to subsequently leave that meeting in a huff, declaring it to be “a waste of time.”
All in all, Trump’s week has been brash, extravagant, and unpredictable. In other words, right in his reality-television wheelhouse. And yet none of it has done much to move the needle in his favor in a significant way.
Who would have thought that a dyed-in-the-wool bully couldn’t make the best use of the bully pulpit? Well, if you’ve been following politics for longer than the past week, you’d already know what Trump is, perhaps, beginning to learn: The powers of presidential persuasion are vastly overrated.
View the complete January 14 article by Jason Linkins on the ThinkProgress website here.