Trump's 2020 vengeance and cruelty campaign
by digby
Trump thinks he won last week.
This is how he acts when he wins.
Imagine 2021:
President Trump is cutting against historical and political norms on a trifecta of big issues at the heart of U.S. domestic, economic and security policy.
Driving the news:
Trump is seeking to kill "Obamacare" through the courts over the objection of his own attorney general and top GOP congressional leaders.
The White House is publicly pushing the Fed to cut interest rates, something prior administrations never contemplated doing.
The president is again publicly threatening to close ports of entry on the U.S. southern border. "I'm not playing games," Trump said Friday in Florida.
The State Department said the U.S. will cut off aid to the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the Northern Triangle. Trump said: "No money goes there anymore. ... We stopped payment." The WashPost reports that the escalation involves hundreds of millions of dollars.
A Trump administration official familiar with the situation told Axios that the president "is definitely serious about" closing the border and "has talked about it quite a few times and wanted to do it several times."
The source said Trump's idea would mean that day laborers could cross the border, but that it would otherwise be a "total no entry."
But administration officials privately say it's unlikely Trump will follow through on his threat, and they acknowledge that they're nowhere near prepared to execute on such a radical plan on the president's threatened timeline of this week.
The widespread view within the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security is that it's a terrible and unworkable idea.
Trump administration officials have been discussing the impracticalities, such as U.S. citizens coming and going across the border.
But Trump wants it. So "it's being looked into, what it could and would look like," the administration official said.
Who knows if he'll accomplish it. But he did accomplish cutting off foreign aid to the three countries. That is inevitably going to make everything worse.
He gets angry when he thinks he's won because he wants revenge for ever having been opposed in the first place. He believes it's "unfair" for him to be questioned.
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