gracchusdixit

The Strait of Messina, a two-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Sicily from Italy, is one of the most consequential bodies of water in human history.  Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and sits almost precisely in its middle.  From time immemorial, this 10,000-square-mile triangle of jagged coastline and craggy mountain valleys has confronted mariners with a major roadblock.  Sailing their way from Europe to North Africa, or vice versa, they could spent weeks making the long voyage around this hulking island or take the short-cut through the Strait.  For Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans and Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, for the Royal Navy and the U.S. Sixth Fleet, controlling this narrow channel has always been a strategic priority of paramount importance.

The problem is that the currents in the Strait of Messina are treacherous, the winds are unpredictable, and the waves, constantly flecked with foam, often seem to run in all directions at once.  For thousands of years, this roiling body of water was more than a short-cut, it was often a death-trap.  

The ancient Greeks dramatized this peril, as they did with so many things, by creating a myth—a myth about two sea monsters named Scylla and Charybdis.  Scylla symbolized the rocky shoals on the Italian side of the strait; Charybdis signified the eddies and whirlpools on the Sicilian side.  During his long journey home after the Trojan War, the epic hero, Odysseus, was blown far off course and found himself confronting these twin monsters.  He could hew toward the ravenous jaws of Scylla, where some of his men would undoubtedly be gobbled up but his ship at least had a chance of surviving, or he could tack toward the vertiginous whirlpool of Charybdis, where everyone and everything might be lost.  Wily Odysseus, as he was nicknamed by the poet Homer, made a characteristically wily decision.  He chose Scylla—and survived. 

Three thousand years later, Donald J. Trump made a different choice in confronting the opposing dangers of his own Scylla and Charybdis.  In the process, he revealed himself to be, not only far less wily than the hero of Homer’s ancient epic, but a political dunce. 

Trump’s Scylla was the many-headed monster of right-wing media:  ranters and ravers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, who make fortunes by stirring up Trump’s “base” and by taunting him endlessly to shut the southern border, stop the flow of immigrants, round up those already here, and deport them faster than you can say habeas corpus.  These inflammatory cretins insist that Trump’s campaign promise to build a “very, very great wall” isn’t just another empty and expedient slogan but a solemn and inviolable pledge.  If he were to break that pledge, they warn, the Trump presidency would come crashing down.  

It has never been clear that these caterwauling Cassandra’s have as much influence over the Trump electorate as they claim, but Trump seems to believe that they do.  Coward that he is, he therefore decided to shut down much of the federal government to evade their ire.

Having scurried away from his Scylla, Trump had no alternative but to rush toward his Charybdis, the newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Honorable Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi.  Foolishly, he imagined her to be the lesser of the two monsters, having convinced himself that he held all the cards, that border security would be “very bad politics for the Democrats,” and that Pelosi would “cave” in the end.  All of which makes clear that Donald Trump is not the sailor wily Odysseus was.  In tacking toward his Charybdis, Trump entirely misjudged the political winds as well as the currents of public opinion.  He steered his listing, leaking vessel straight to the edge of Nancy Pelosi’s whirlpool.

The first sign that Trump’s ship was taking on water came when he summoned Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, to a meeting in the White House, where he demanded money for his wall as the price of reopening the government.  By all accounts, Pelosi responded with her signature smile and an unequivocal “no”.  Unaccustomed to being challenged by anyone, let alone a woman, Trump threw a tantrum, abruptly rose, and stomped off in a huff.

In a matter of hours, Pelosi followed her demurral with a letter, postponing the annual State of the Union address until the government reopened and there would actually be a “union” to discuss.  Trump seems to have thought that this report to Congress is a presidential “right” rather than a constitutional obligation, nor did he realize that the invitation to deliver this report publicly, before a joint session of Congress and the whole nation, is a gift solely in the power of the Speaker of the House to give.  For several days, he huffed and puffed about going forward over Pelosi’s objections.  But all the huffing and puffing turned out to be, as it usually is with Donald Trump, mere bluster.  In the end, it was Trump who “caved,” acknowledging Pelosi’s “prerogative” to disinvite him.

Things then got even worse.  Trump sent his obsequious vice president and his overconfident son-in-law on a mission to “do a deal,” the aim of which was to peel away so-called “moderate” Democrats from states that voted for Trump.  It didn’t work.  

Not only did Democrats stick with Pelosi more tightly than barnacles on a hull, Republicans began to peel away from their own commander in chief.  The House of Representatives passed a series of bills to reopen the government, with overwhelmingly majorities that included scores of Republicans.  In the Senate, a bill advanced by the White House won fewer Republican votes than a parallel bill sponsored by Democrats.  Whatever parliamentary mojo Trump thought he possessed, had evaporated.

The last straw came when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came face to face with his own Scylla and Charybdis.   As Republican senators saw the polling grow worse by the day, as they were besieged by countless angry constituents, as they watched Trump thrash about with increasing desperation and disarray, they threw up their hands and turned their wrath against McConnell.  

Whatever else he may be, Mitch McConnell is a skillful navigator of political waters no less wily than the Odysseus of old.   Without so much as a blink or a wink, McConnell pulled the plug on Trump’s leaking boat. The melodrama of the Trump shutdown, the longest shutdown of the federal government in American history, came to a whimpering end.

To save face, Trump is claiming that this humiliation is just a temporary time-out and that he will, in the end, get his wall by one means or another.  No one believes this, perhaps not even Trump himself.   

Before this fiasco, Donald Trump’s presidency was already spiraling downward.  Now, he finds himself caught in the vortex of his own Charybdis.  He is the one who made this choice.  From this whirlpool,  there is no escape.