Pettiness remains the modus operandi inside the Trump administration as the longest government shutdown in American history drags on. High profile reporter Jim Acosta summed up President Donald Trump’s response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seeking the postponement of Trump’s State of the Union address as the president further establishing himself as basically a wannabe schoolyard bully.
As Acosta described it:
‘Our nation’s capital has officially become a playground. The president has responded in sort of — a childish way, is the only way to describe it — to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi… this letter is not really a serious response to what the House Speaker said yesterday.’
Watch below.
Pelosi had sought to delay the president’s speech to ultimately keep the government focused on ending the ongoing shutdown, which has temporarily claimed the jobs of some 800,000 federal employees and put the services those employees provide to millions of Americans on thin ice. Instead of even remotely acknowledging that Pelosi was right to be concerned, Trump responded with a Thursday letter asserting that Pelosi’s upcoming official travel overseas would be indefinitely postponed, by his order.
As Acosta noted, the White House has yet to even address the core issue at hand of when the president will or won’t deliver his State of the Union address. They’re just being petty.
It appears that the president means he will be barring official government funds and/or personnel from going towards Pelosi’s travel, which is ironic considering it’s not as though he’s stopped his own travel. He went to Louisiana just this past week to speak at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s convention, where he offered a rambling campaign style speech in support of his wall proposal and the shutdown.
Throughout the previous months and years of his presidency, he’s spent millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars for hundreds of days of vacation at his golf properties.
The facts of his personal behavior make the claim that he “can relate” to shutdown-affected government workers all the more troubling, as does the fact that alongside that claim, he’s said he’s willing to have the government remain shutdown for months or even years over his commitment to his immigration policy stance.
Acosta personally has butted heads with the White House on this topic before. He’d been asking about issues including Trump’s dismissal of a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America as an “invasion” during the infamous showdown that ended with the Trump team attempting to completely block Acosta from the White House grounds. Acosta eventually won his press pass back after a court battle.
The administration hasn’t let up with their claims about the supposed special danger posed by immigrants, however. They’ve raised the issue of the many victims of crimes perpetrated by immigrants — and completely ignored the many, many more victims of the plagues on modern American society like gun violence and sexual harassment and assault — and even something as more mundane as tainted food! Tainted food has killed more people than undocumented immigrants in the last year, according to educated estimates — and food inspectors are among those impacted by the shutdown!
Featured Image via screenshot from the video
