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I’ll confess to being torn about the major television networks’ decision to air President Trump’s speech tonight on the border wall. On the one hand, the networks said no to President Barack Obama when he asked for airtime to give a speech on immigration in 2014. They said it was too political to deserve a free prime-time spot — and Trump’s speech is clearly political, as well.

But if they had said no to Trump, the decision would have dominated the political conversation for at least a couple of days. The issue would be a fight between Trump and the media as much as it would be about the government shutdown or immigr ation policy. And I think fights between Trump and the media tend to benefit Trump . They turn attention away from his own presidential incompetence and misbehavior toward journalists , who aren’t exactly the most popular group of people in the country.

Of course, this whole situation means that Trump is effectively rewarded for his scorched-earth style of politics — with a prime-time address. But don’t despair. The speech probably won’t matter, as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion explains. “We have plenty of evidence on this one: Presidential speeches rarely change minds,” he writes this morning. “Voters most likely to tune in to such a speech are the partisans least likely to change their minds, either about the policy or the president.”