Sometimes in life you get what you want but do not recognize it. For more than a month, President Donald J. Trump, enabled by the Republicans, has held 800,000 federal workers and, indeed, the entire nation hostage and all for a wall that is designed ostensibly to increase security at the southern border but is really about keeping out the people he considers undesirable.
And yet, Donnie already has a wall.
Her name is Nancy Pelosi. And everywhere he turns, he finds himself up against it, her.
You have to hand it to Madame Speaker. Demonized by the right, dismissed by the left, Pelosi has found herself in a position familiar to women of a certain vintage: She has found herself underestimated. But even that has had advantages. The daughter of “Big Tommy” D’Alesandro, onetime congressman and mayor of Baltimore, Pelosi has brilliantly deployed her troops — unleashing the millennial Furies, as Maureen Dowd called the young guns led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on poor Senate Majority Leader “Mitchie” McConnell as if we were in the final act of “The Oresteia,” except without, you know, the Aeschylean poetry; and deploying faithful lieutenants Nita Lowey and Maxine Waters to chair the appropriations and finance committees.
Women now control the purse strings of this country, but then, they always did, because unlike men, they actually buy stuff. (If that weren’t true, car commercials wouldn’t have so many pretty colors and safety features, am I right, guys?)
Pelosi will ultimately give Trump money, but she’s already exacted her price. Trump owns the shutdown, and his poll numbers keep dropping. Meanwhile, the State of the Union address is MIA as Pelosi has denied Trump his big moment on the House of Representatives stage. (No great loss. I think we know the state of this union.)
It hasn’t helped that Commerce Secretary Wilbur “Let them eat cake” Ross can’t understand why the furloughed workers and those working without pay don’t just go out and get loans. Because it’s so easy to get a loan when you don’t have collateral, right, Wilbur?
So say what you want about Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris, all running for president now. But the most powerful person in the world at the moment is the woman who isn’t. And she’s got Trump by a certain portion of his anatomy. Who knows? If the Mueller investigation goes the way some think it will, Pelosi might wind up president by default.
In the meantime, maybe Trump can book .a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel Washington D.C. I hear the acoustics are great for giving speeches.