Thread by @sethjlevy

1/ Pelosi was actually very honest in her press conference and mostly what she was actually saying was missed.

When asked if Trump was baiting her she said let’s not talk about that. But she also said Trump is a great distractor. Then she revealed the key piece.

2/ Pelosi said you have to give him credit for that. For being a great distractor. But what did she mean?

3/ Well to understand what Pelosi meant you have to look at the series of events that led to Trumps tweets on Saturday morning.

4/ Most analysts have said Trump blundered because he distracted from Democrat infighting that had spilled into the public. But that analysis is flawed mostly because it overlooks what they were arguing about.

5/ Pelosi and the squad were fighting ever since Pelosi passed the funding for the border facilities.

They were arguing about the appropriate response to combating Hitler, I mean Trump, from transforming our border facilities into concentration camps.

nytimes.com/2019/06/18/us/…

6/ It wasn’t over whether they were concentration camps but which approach to combating them was most appropriate.

The concentration camp part was becoming cemented as truth.

But what actually drove Trump to tweet, to distract?

Why Saturday morning?

7/ Well to understand that you have to look at what happened on Friday.

Pence took congresspeople and the media to the facilities in McAllen TX. Generally it was a success. Except the media was winning the spin battle.

8/ The media was selling the Pence visit as a disaster. According to them the key moment was when Pence had turned his back on a cage full of brown men who were suffering. They had framed it as a brazen display of the Trump administration’s indifference.

independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…

9/ Then later that night @Alyssa_Milano posted her famous image.

10/ What was actually a successful trip, that plainly showed the Trump admin was caring for women and children and also doing the best they could with single men who had been convicted of crimes and made multiple attempts to illegally enter, had turned into a PR disaster.

11/ So lets go back to that “fight” between Pelosi and the Squad. In reality Pelosi understands unconventional political warfare. She knows people pay attention to the soap opera. She was loving how things were proceeding. Democrats had all the momentum. Trump was a Nazi.

12/ Then everything changed at 8:27 AM Saturday morning. The great “distractor” changed the context of the argument and took back control of the narrative. He reasserted himself as the defender of American greatness. How did he do it?

13/ He cast the Squad, who I affectionately call the four new congresswomen of the apocalypse, as attempting to impose unproven solutions on America. He cast them as “foreign” and suggested they prove their solutions could work by trying them somewhere else first.

14/ In other words he seriously raised the stakes. Used an inflammatory attack to reset the terms of the narrative and he forced America to consider that the Squad desired not to fix America but to destroy it.

15/ The Squad was left to defend itself. And predictably they cast Trump’s attack as racist. But because they had just accused Pelosi of the same it blunted their argument.

16/ In a hastily arranged press conference Monday, they explained how hurtful Trump’s attack was. But having been the purveyors of the concentration camp attacks, they’re offense rang political. Then they devolved into they’re radicalism by avoiding a chance to denounce Al-Qaeda.

17/ Shortly after, videos appeared showing the Squad refusing to condemn the Antifa attack on an ICE facility in the state of Washington. Then on Tuesday the RNC dropped a commercial repackaging the events of the previous few days as a display of radical anarchy. Trump had won.

18/ Pelosi attempted to take the high ground by passing a resolution condemning Trump but chaos exploded on the House floor that ultimately required Pelosi to break House rules in order to pass the resolution. It was a clown show. Pelosi had lost.

apple.news/Ap2lE7mcZQ9GzC…

19/ All setting the stage for Pelosi to step to the podium this morning. Imagine, Democrats had invested months looking to tie the failing facilities as an anchor around Trump’s neck and in 72 hours he slipped the noose and instead tied the squad around Pelosi’s neck.

20/ Pelosi was reduced to declaring that Democrats also want to make America great again and then defining her view of American exceptionalism. It was a full capitulation. Pelosi knew that what Trump achieved was masterful and she acknowledged it. /end