OPINION: TRUMP SHOULD DITCH CONGRESS AND HOST A RALLY IN MIDDLE AMERICA

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trapped within a spectacle of her own making. After disinviting the president of the United States from delivering the State of the Union address under the false pretense of “security concerns,” the president has answered back.

Turns out, there is no security concern at all.

President Trump responded to Pelosi with a letter of his own, reassuring her that he was “contacted by the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Secret Service to explain that there would be absolutely no problem regarding security with respect to the event. They have since confirmed this publicly.”

Pelosi has since doubled down, insisting she will not allow the speech to take place on the House floor.

Somewhere in Vegas, a casino is taking bets on whether the speaker has the nerve to refuse a vote on the resolution that formally invites the president to appear before a joint session of Congress. Without this vote passing both chambers, the president could be physically prevented from accessing the floor of the House of Representatives on Jan. 29.

Come next Tuesday, the lights may be turned off in the House chamber. Members of the press could arrive to locked doors.

Nancy Pelosi may have control over the location of the speech, but she cannot press the “mute” button on Donald J. Trump. White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Fox News, “Nancy Pelosi does not dictate to the president when he will or will not have a conversation with the American people.”

Which some of us thinking — he is absolutely right.

The show goes on, with or without Chuck and Nancy. President Trump should send a written State of the Union address to Congress to fulfill his constitutional duty, and then deliver his progress report directly to the people.

After all, the only audience that matters (especially leading up to the 2020 election) is the American public.

Who needs the backdrop of scowling Democrat socialists and Nancy Pelosi rolling her eyes behind the president’s back? Why entertain the dramatics of Democratic lawmakers who will announce they’re boycotting the event at the eleventh hour?

Congressional Democrats only respect the office of the presidency when there is a Democrat occupying the Oval Office. Their radical obstructionism and game-playing is a big reason why Congress has a 20 percent approval rating, according to Gallup, and a 13 percent approval rating according to the Economist/YouGov.

President Trump has never played by the rules of the swamp. He doesn’t care about the “way things are normally done,” or maintaining the status quo in Washington. When it comes to the State of the Union address, why not let Trump be Trump and take his show back on the road?

Hold the speech in a stadium in Ohio, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania. Hold it in Cowboys Stadium in Dallas. The bigger the better. Wherever it is, it’ll be yuuuuge.

By disinviting the president to the House chamber, Speaker Pelosi is trying to deprive Donald Trump of an important platform, to keep him out of the “room where it happens.” What she fails to understand is that Trump is the room where it happens. Where he goes, the American people’s attention goes.

And by spritzing the State of the Union address with fresh controversy, Pelosi has just granted the president the ultimate boost in ratings.

An unprecedented number of viewers would tune in for the controversy, and hear the facts instead. They would learn that real gross domestic product (GDP) growth exceeded 3 percent over the last four quarters. That more than 5 million jobs have been created since President Trump got elected.

Americans who struggled to make ends meet during the Obama years would learn the number of job openings now exceeds the number of Americans looking for work for the first time in American history.

They would learn that approximately 4.6 million Americans left the food stamp program since President Trump took office, with African-American and Hispanic-American poverty rates reaching record lows in 2017 at 21.2 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively.

Business owners would learn that President Trump eliminated 22 regulations for every new one created in 2017, and 12 regulations for every new one created in 2018.

Do you get it yet, Speaker Pelosi? President Trump doesn’t care about being liked by congressional Democrats. In fact, he seems to get a kick out of being the enemy of the corrupt, entrenched, Washington political establishment.

That’s exactly why grassroots America loves him.