Trump under fire over ‘crisis’ speech
US President Donald Trump is holding Americans hostage by refusing to strike a deal to fund shuttered government agencies, and using fear-mongering to justify his demand for his much-hyped border wall, top congressional Democrats claim.
“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government,” speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said in a curt rebuttal to Trump’s address to the nation, in which he declared the situation on the southern border a “crisis of the heart”.
The political impasse over Trump’s wall demand – and the divided Congress’s refusal to fund it – has kept key government agencies closed for 18 days, with few signs that a breakthrough is imminent.
Trump used a prime-time address to the nation to insist on $5.7bn (R80bn) for a steel wall along the Mexican border that he said would stop the shedding of “American blood” by illegal immigrants.
The nine-minute speech contained no concessions to Democrats refusing to fund construction of the wall – a project Trump has made his signature domestic policy idea.
The address also offered no hope for a quick end to a partial government shutdown.
And with Democrats reclaiming the majority in the House of Representatives, Trump has lost his monopoly on congressional power that could have helped him reach agreement with legislators.
About 800,000 federal workers, and many more contractors, are not being paid, but Trump said that problem could be resolved swiftly if Democrats simply “fund border security”.
In a sombre appeal to the nation, Trump spoke of Americans who had been “savagely murdered in cold blood” by illegal immigrants.
“How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” he said.
The Democrats rejected Trump’s fear-mongering as “misinformation and even malice”, with Pelosi blasting the president’s “obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall”.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, standing with Pelosi in the US Capitol, accused Trump of throwing a temper tantrum over the border, where he appealed to fear, not facts. “No president should demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down, hurting millions of Americans who are treated as leverage,” Schumer said.
“The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 10-metre wall,” he said.
Meanwhile, this week the American Astronomical Society is meeting in Seattle, but no one from Nasa is attending.
In Phoenix, thousands of meteorologists are presenting research on climate change and extreme weather, but hundreds of representatives from the National Weather Service and other US agencies cancelled at the 11th hour.
Keith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society, said the absence of about 700 US government employees at his group’s annual meeting will mean the loss of about 800 presentations.
It slashed total attendance at the five-day meeting in Arizona from 4,400 to about 3,700.
The US space agency Nasa and the National Science Foundation, one of the main sources of research funding in the country, have also grounded their experts from attending any conferences until further notice.