Every time conventional Beltway wisdom congeals as quickly as it did on Tuesday — this time around, the certainty that President Donald Trump had blundered terribly in saying he would in effect “own” any government shutdown over border security funding — analysts ought to think back to the stunned silences around many newsrooms on Election Day in 2016.
Rarely have so many abjectly incorrect experts shrugged off their face-plants of recent vintage to return to high degrees of certainty in so short a period of time. It’s the same class of talking heads that didn’t see 2010 coming, or 2014, or who think they can claim there was a “blue wave” even though Republicans increased their Senate majority by two.