Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Daniel McCarthy, who is the editor of modern age and a regular contributor to Spectator USA.

And we're going to be talking about Trump's emergency declaration of a wall and whether it can be stopped or is going to be stopped.

Dan, we have a piece on the website today about Mitch McConnell has said that he, the Senate

will pass a resolution to disprove Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency on the border.

This is being hyped up as quite a significant bit of news.

How significant do you think it is?

Well, your word is exactly right. It's being hyped up.

So Beltway commentators like these kinds of splits between a party and its president,

and they attribute great significance to them. But I don't know that the American people really

followed the arcana of Senate votes and, you know, veto overrides and so forth as closely as the pundits do. So it seems to

me that there's going to be much less of a public reaction to this than there will be in terms of

a media reaction. Now, that said, the media, you know, are going to try so hard to trump this up into

something that's a big embarrassment for the president, that inevitably he'll get asked questions

about it and it'll be, you know, a little bit of a ruckus. But I really don't think in the end

it matters very much, especially since Trump is just going to override the veto and that'll be the

end of it. Yes. Nonetheless, it is interesting that, you know, Mitch McConnell, the Republican

Senate Majority Leader is at odds with Trump on this as he is on things like

withdrawal from Syria. And it's even more interesting, perhaps, to note that Rand Paul has

joined the 47 Senate Democrats. McConnell is actually sort of caught between Iraq and a hard place

here. So McConnell's going to vote for the president.

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