And that’s how the story will end for the “B” men if and when we ever reach that point in the next four years. Let’s look at the Republicans and the right-wing media. Their arguments against our president and for Trumpism are bankrupt from the start. It’s a dead-end fight that can’t be won by their side. Let’s be clear: the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, lost the presidency in 2016. Its nominee was so horrible as a human being and campaigner that his party has still not recovered and is flailing around to find the best way to lose to a guy from New York, California or Bermuda. There is no point in having a debate about who’s a more honorable and deserving presidential candidate between Hillary Clinton and any one of the Republicans who was vying to be her opponent in 2016, such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or John Kasich. None of them – I repeat, none of them – can be seen as “presidential material” and in retrospect, none of them even deserved the nomination to run. If that sounds self-serving or self-satisfied, it is. I’ve written that, right from the beginning, I’m happy that I didn’t have to vote for any of them, and that, all things considered, they weren’t what I considered good or worthy choices for the most powerful job in the country. But for the Republican party to claim that one of them would have been more legitimate as president than Hillary Clinton or than a former first lady, a former secretary of state or a former vice president is, at this point, to engage in intellectual myopia. I get that the GOP thinks Trump was the right guy for the job – or just the job he would have wanted – and that somehow the presidency he has led as our president has been more “presidential” than anything the Clintons or the Obamas have done. That’s their right. It’s a free country. And, God knows, they need to believe it, no matter how much it might hurt their heads or hearts. It’s all the more reason, however, for us on the left to stop fighting a losing battle with their nonsense. The president is who he is. He is what he is. He is not my president or you’re not my president, in case you were wondering. That would imply that we all have a choice in the matter. He is the president, and that’s all there is to it. Trump is the president and he’s not interested in doing the job or in thinking the thoughts necessary to make him a more honorable one. Donald Trump is the president and he’s ours. That’s his job. That’s all he wants to be. He was elected to this job and he wasn’t elected to be “presidential.” If Republicans in Congress really wanted to do right by the president, if they were seriously willing to stand up for the ideas he’s claimed to embrace and have staked out for his presidency, it’s hard to argue they couldn’t do more than they’ve been doing. Not for them, but for all of us. They certainly don’t have any fear of Trump telling them what to do or not to do. There are too many Republican senators, in fact, who are doing just fine with a Trump administration, and there are certainly some of the old guard, who have had it with Trump, but are looking for a “nice to have” relationship with the White House. That’s a nice way of saying, Trump’s a real scuzzball. But they’re okay with that. Some of them have the luxury of thinking, they’ve done what they can for the country and now they can go do what they want. And that’s all they’ll need to do for this next term, as all those Republicans who are trying to work with the administration are really not going to be in power for much longer. They’ll go down with Trump. As they should. And that’s how the story will end for the “B” men if and when we ever reach that point in the next four years. A very strong speech from Nancy Pelosi on the House floor, where she is being challenged and the vote is being delayed. “Republicans,” she said, “were so bent on getting President Obama out of the White House, they did everything in their power to make sure we didn’t have a functioning government.” Pelosi: “The new President came in with the promise of ‘drain the swamp.’ If we are to deliver on that promise to the American people, we must stand up and show the Republican Congress that their behavior is not normal or accepted.” The woman from San Francisco, one of the House Democratic leadership, said the “dispute has gone on for two months and the people’s business, their jobs, their health care, their retirement, is now at risk. What are they afraid of?” Rep. Pelosi, a reference to Trump’s tax reform plan, called the Republicans “un-American,” “extreme,” “mean,” and “reckless” for demanding the House vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The vote, she says, is a violation of their oath to the Constitution. “We must speak the truth,” Pelosi said. “The Republican vision is to turn back the clock. … They are going backwards, not forwards. They are going back to policies that were bad for America and bad for our middle class.” It’s now two and a half weeks later and here we are, with more than a week left until the government shutdown will become official. The good news for Republicans is that when you say you’re going to get something done, especially something controversial like this, it’s easy to turn a conversation from a shutdown into a discussion of blame for the president. And if you don’t know how to make it seem like the president is the problem, blame the Democrats. But now the GOP doesn’t know which way to go, either. For them, there’s only one problem here. They really have no good options at all. It’s time for the government to run for a week or two and come up with some sort of a budget deal. But that would mean that they have to come to some sort of a compromise with the Democrats, which is what they tried to do in the summer. But this time they’re on the hot seat, and they don’t have time to waste. And they are being totally disingenuous about the idea that the spending bill the GOP has already passed is really the end of the world. First of all, it is really the middle of February, so a government shutdown has an awful lot more publicity value to it. The Democrats can say, “Do you know how many more people are dying every day now that this is going on?” It’s hard to take this a bit of a non-event, when that is how it is being played by both parties. For the Democrats, meanwhile, the question is, “What do they want?” With their own majorities in the House and the Senate, they can’t negotiate, but they have to say something. But what’s a vote for? I guess that’s a question they need to answer, too. The president has been pushing for a border wall, a long wall, an 18-foot wall, but when it comes to the specifics, all we’re really getting from the Senate and the House is something “big, beautiful and powerful” – as in, big and powerful. That’s what we’re gonna need to see. You know what they say – politics is the art of the possible. But we’re in a tough spot in this country, in Washington, D.C., which is always the place where anything could happen. About The Author Roger Sant Roger Sant is a syndicated columnist, author, and lawyer. His columns appear in dozens of newspapers throughout the country each week. Roger is the author of several books including the Amazon bestselling novel, The Extra Man, which was released on July 12, 2017. The book is currently the #1 bestselling legal thriller on Amazon and the New York Times bestselling book, The Burden of Bad Choices. The Amazon bestselling novella, The Trial of Tony Blair, was recently made into a motion picture by the same title, distributed by Freestyle Releasing. Another book, The Trial of Donald Trump, has been released by HarperCollins, and has received extensive publicity from NBC