The Pottery Barn Rule is simple. The sign says: “You break it, you bought it.” Donald Trump tried his mighty best to break the $20 billion border fix proposed in the Congress by President Biden. Trump instructed House Speaker Mike Johnson back in mid-January not to accept a border fix proposed by President Biden so Trump could keep the border a campaign issue while he ran for office. Had Trump succeeded in breaking the President’s border fix, though, both Trump and the Republicans under the Pottery Barn Rule would have owned the border crisis for the rest of 2024.
Instead, President Biden, ever the master legislative strategist from years of experience on the Hill, succeeded in getting his $20 billion border fix anyway. The President wrote the border fix into the $1.2 trillion spending bill. Congress had to pass it in the wee hours of Saturday, March 23 to keep the government from shutting down.
For the sake of solving the border, it was a close-run thing. Trump indeed had managed for a time to break the border fix. At first Republicans in both the House and then the Senate accepted Trump’s instruction not to take up the Biden border fix. That was true even though the President’s administration negotiated the fix as a bipartisan bill with conservative Republican Senator Lames Lankford (R-Okla) and independent Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz). In fact, the pressure on Senator Lankford to kill his own bipartisan bill—the most conservative ever written, providing far more enforcement than Trump ever provided in his own term--became intense from Trump supporters. Lankford complained publicly one Trump Oklahoma “commentator” had threatened him. Lankford, a loyal Republican, was told by Trump’s man: “I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.” (AP, Feb 7).
In the end the government funding package at President Biden’s insistence included nearly $20 billion for US Customs and Border protection. It will provide $495 million to increase the number of Border Patrol agents to 22,000, the most ever funded. It includes $20 million to hire an additional 150 officers to support counter-fentanyl interdiction. It includes $10 billion for US Immigration and Customs enforcement. Had Trump succeeded in breaking the border fix, he and the Republican party would have owned the border crisis under the Pottery Barn Rule just so they could run on it.
As it was MAGA Republican Representative Scott Perry (R-Pa) complained bitterly: “And what are Democrats, what are they going to run on when they pass this bill? 22,000 border agents, 41,500 detention beds.” President Biden couldn’t have said it better. The CNN clip will make a great ad for the President’s reelection. “Biden gets things done; the other guy only makes chaos.”
Extreme partisanship, chaos and divisions of a narcissist’s own making continue to fuel the candidacy of Trump, the chaos candidate. For many Republican moderates it may prove to be the bridge too far.
Chaos will also follow Mr. Trump into his criminal trials. Mr. Trump’s first felony trial begins in New York April 25. We have never had a presidential candidate convicted of a felony before. What happens then? The polls show felony convictions in any of the cases involving Mr. Trump would be a game changer. In the resulting post-trial chaos, the Pottery Barn Rule would also become clear to Mr. Trump and his party: when you break the law, you buy the farm.
Then too there is the problem of Mr. Trump’s proclivity to pal around with dictators. President Biden pledged in his State of the Union address “we will not walk away” from Ukraine. Biden said directly to Putin: “We will not bow down. I will not bow down. History is watching.” Within days of those pledges by President Biden, though, Mr. Trump (in possible violation of the Logan Act—there is only one President at a time to negotiate foreign policy), welcomed Hungarian leader Victor Orban to Mara Logo. Mr. Orban wants Europe to abandon all aid to Ukraine. It was Orban’s state apparatus that took over the free press in Hungary, ended any real party competition, and turned Hungary into an illiberal democracy. Mr. Trump called Orban “fantastic”. President Joe Biden in response warned of Orban: “he stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works – he’s looking for dictatorship.” Instead, Mr. Biden said, “I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it”. Again, beware the Pottery Barn Rule applies: if you vote in someone who breaks your constitution and breaks your freedoms, then what did you just buy?
