News broke tonight that Donald Trump has put off funding the border wall (the one Mexico was supposed to pay for) until the fall. But Tucker Carlson was too busy cherry picking the good-for-Trump news out of a recent poll to talk about it.
Tonight, The Washington Post reported:
The White House sought Monday to calm a jittery Washington ahead of a showdown with Congress over spending, and President Trump softened his demand that a deal to keep the federal government open include money to begin construction on his long-promised border wall.
[…] In the face of fierce Democratic opposition to funding the wall’s construction, White House officials signaled Monday that the president may be open to an agreement that includes money for border security if not specifically for a wall, with an emphasis on technology and border agents rather than a structure.
Trump showed even more flexibility Monday afternoon, telling conservative journalists in a private meeting that he was open to delaying funding for wall construction until September, a White House official confirmed.
As the screen grabs (via NewsHound Richard) show below, CNN and MSNBC covered the breaking news early in the 8 PM ET hour. But even though Tucker Carlson Tonight was live, the top story was a debate with a Democrat about Trump’s poll numbers.
By the way, the “TRUMP WINS AGAIN” graphic dominating the center of the Fox screen – a reference to the poll’s findings that if the 2016 presidential election were held again today, Trump would win the popular vote – obscures the terrible news for Trump that dominated the poll: historic disapproval ratings, majorities of Americans saying he lacks the judgment, temperament, honesty and trustworthiness to serve effectively as president.
Yet Carlson complained, without a trace of irony, that the rest of the media was doing the cherry picking because it ignored the (probably meaningless) finding that Clinton would lose the popular vote today. Sadly, the Democratic guest, Richard Goodstein never called out Carlson’s deceptive deflection.
Watch Tucker Carlson hang onto Trump’s sliver of good news to suggest that Democrats are in trouble in 2020 below, from the April 24, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
First, that poll is not showing what Carlson is frantically trying to say it shows. The poll shows that many Dems are disillusioned right now, which is understandable given that Dem congresspeople are outnumbered and mostly irrelevant at this time, while the Right Wing is theoretically free to romp their agenda through. The only thing stopping the Right these days is themselves, as we saw in the spectacular failure of the Pence White House to ram through its first assault on the ACA. The more relevant polls are those recent elections where GOP candidates in supposedly safe districts are being given a run for their money by Dems who shouldn’t have been able to come within 15 points and are instead scaring the heck out of the Right.
Next, it’s clear that Pence intends to pull the federal subsidies from the insurers still in the ACA – he’s already threatened to do this in short order. Trump gilded the notion by suggesting that he’d hold off on this approach if the Dems either supported the vicious Wall project or supported the various gutting proposals re the ACA. Pence is fully aware the Dems will play no part in this kind of nonsense, and even Carlson is aware that current polling shows that 61% of the country is holding the GOP responsible for what it does to the ACA.
I really have to wonder how Carlson is going to react if the Dems consolidate the very real anger in this country next November.