KLAVAN: Is Trump Playing A Long Game On The Border?

There is an ongoing debate among right-leaning thinkers. How smart — or stupid — is Donald Trump? Is he some barely animate idiot bouncing around like a Pachinko ball, hitting upon occasional success at random? Or is he the orange version of Mr. Spock, playing multi-dimensional chess with Earthlings who simply cannot comprehend his genius?

I tend to come down in the middle of this question. Trump doesn’t strike me as the deepest thinker in the world. But a guy who changed the skyline of New York when everyone else was abandoning the sinking leftist ship, who fronted a hit TV show for nearly a decade and a half, and who made the geniuses of political commentary look like monkeys by winning the White House, may be many things, but he’s not just lucky.

I compare Trump to a great running back, a man who knows where political daylight is without even thinking about it. He’s a gut guy. Brain guys despise gut guys, but an awful lot of brain guys end up working for gut guys because the gut guys sense things what the brain guys are too smart to observe. That’s Trump.

In keeping with this theory, I notice that Trump does something important that a lot of the people observing him never do. He changes. He adapts. He finds new ways to daylight. Because the people who observe him don’t do this — because they have their ideas and they stick to them and crunch the facts to fit them — this tactic is invisible to them. They think he’s always acting the same way, and he’s just not.

So I wonder: is Trump losing the battle over border security as badly as it seems he is? Or is he playing the sort of long game no one ever expects of him? Not three-dimensional chess exactly. Let’s call it Patience.

His emphasis on the caravan and border security during the mid-terms did not serve him well. The people voted the map — they went the way you would expect them to go in their states and districts. That means that all the talk about criminals invading our country excited the usual Trump supporters, but did not expand the base the way smart politics should.

In the aftermath, Trump started leaning hard on the wall at a time when it was nigh on impossible he was going to get much of what he wanted. The government shutdown went badly for him. Pelosi won everything, Trump nothing. The new bill to keep the government funded seems pretty much more of the same. And Trump’s declaration of a national emergency has conservatives (like me) very worried that the president is extending executive power beyond the proper bounds and giving the Democrats an excuse to do the same the next time they’re in power. No matter what the diehard Trump-bots say, this is not the typical national emergency and it does not seem to me like a good idea.

However. On the flip side of this, I can’t help noticing that since the mid-terms, Trump has been different. He’s been less, well, Trumpy. Less visible. More restrained. His border security speech from the Oval Office was solid. His offers to negotiate have been fair. His State of the Union was excellent. Even his recent rally in El Paso was less belligerent than the norm. The insults (Beto has nothing going for him but a great first name) were smarter, less childish, less cruel. He remains his essentially pugilistic self, but he’s also been — forgive the cliché — more presidential.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have unleashed a Green New Deal that is a blueprint for ending American freedom and prosperity. They have allowed the bubble-headed Alexandria Occasio-Cortez and the vicious Ilhan Omar to seize the headlines with their ignorance and racism. Virginia is an intersectional clown show that even the news media can’t bury. And new revelations out of the Justice Department give credence to Trump’s repeated charges that he is the victim of an unconstitutional Deep State witch hunt.

I cannot believe I’m saying this, but right this minute, Donald Trump is coming across like the grown-up in the room, the all-American man of practical sense beleaguered by raving ideological incompetents.

Is that just luck, or is it part of a new strategy: the long game?