Donald Trump has been a political escape artist since the beginnings of his shady, scummy, shiftless life.

From his spurious (see what I did there?) evasion of the Vietnam War draft to his serial bankruptcies and business failures, his wrecked marriages, and his current reign of misrule, Donald Trump’s ability to detonate a media IED to distract from his troubles has always served him well. Whenever there’s trouble from some Trump outrage, he never apologizes, never corrects his behavior and never, ever goes forth and sins no more. Instead, he deliberately creates some larger outrage, tossing red meat to a media always eager to chase it.

That was the Trump shutdown from the beginning, and the reason for his manic insistence on “The Wall” scam as its justification.

On Tuesday night, Trump’s flaming dumpster train of distractions, lies, cons, and empty political promises flew off the rails and plunged into a mountain of burning tires in one of his worst public speeches.

After 17 days of a government-shutdown temper tantrum, Trump needed a game-changing home run of a speech to change the political climate in D.C. He failed.