How Democrats Should Counter Trump

The Dems need to counter Trump.

It’s a no-brainer.   They can draw it up with a crayon.

1. Open the government (a deal breaker)
2. $2 billion for border security
3. Complete resolution of DACA, including a path to citizenship

The president can’t win politically but the above provides Trump with a way out of the corner he has painted himself into.  Intense negotiations begin on  #2 and #3 provided the government opens on Monday.

Not A Normal Negotiator

The “best dealmaker of all-time” has committed almost every conceivable error of negotiating during the shutdown.   See Harvard Law’s,  10 Hard-Bargaining Tactics to Watch Out for in a Negotiation.

The Speaker needs to realize she is dealing with a non-normal opponent, one who lacks empathy and doesn’t seem to care about blowing up the country.  She has to allow for a face-saving out in which he can boast about a “win” on Fox and Friends.  Who really cares as 70 percent of the country know it is all bull shit anyway.  The other 30 percent are growing smaller by the day.

Learn From JFK 

Chuck and Nancy can learn from President Kennedy during the “thirteen days” in October 1962.  Put something on the table that allows Rush and Ann to get off the president’s back.

After sizing up Khrushchev after his meeting a year earlier,  JFK knew he had to appease the Soviet hardliners to give Khrushchev some room to maneuver — even though it would come at a political cost —  by removing the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey,  the country’s first nuclear-tipped, medium-range ballistic missiles — or risk nuclear war.

Because the alternative was a nuclear holocaust. Kennedy believed and said so to those he trusted that nuclear weapons, if contained in a country’s arsenal, would eventually be used. And he had first-hand reason to believe that Khrushchev was just the man to pull the trigger. At their meeting in Vienna the prior year this has been made stunningly clear. “I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes,” he later told Time’s Hugh Sidey, “and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.”

And that’s why he was willing to offer  a trade. If the Russians removed their missiles from Cuba, Kennedy told Krushchev that he would remove American missiles stationed in Turkey. Kennedy’s calculation paid off. Khrushchev accepted the trade. 

…  This is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis that gets overlooked but should be the key to all future confrontations with a dangerous enemy: Always leave the other side a way out. Otherwise, they will only have a way in.  – The New Repulbic

The new Democratic House along with the majority of the country don’t like that “F$@ken Wall” just as much as the former president of Mexico, Vincente Fox.

Tabling the above proposal, however, or something similar puts the onus back on the White House to get the government open, which is the country’s most pressing issue.

If the president rejects the proposal, his poll ratings drop another five points.

If the Dems don’t counter, they lose the high ground.   Just Do It.