Trump says, U.S. needs shutdown 'to fix mess'
President WASHINGTON — Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States needs “a good ‘shutdown’” this fall to force a partisan confrontation over federal spending,
and suggested that he might move to reverse longstand
ing Senate rules that effectively require a supermajority to approve most major pieces of legislation.
The declarations, in a pair of posts on Twitter, appeared aimed at defending a spend
ing package that Congress is likely to clear this week, but that fails to accomplish many of Trump’s stated goals, including allocating any money to build a wall on the southern border — a project that was his most talk- ed-about campaign promise. Conservative activists have decried the agreement as one that does not address their priorities, but the White House has signaled that the president would accept it rather than set off a govern- ment shutdown.
The Twitter messages were also an indication of the degree to which bipartisan negotiations in Congress on the spending bill and others, including a health care overhaul that appeared Tuesday to be stalled yet again, have bedeviled Trump at this early stage of his presidency, forcing him to bow to politi- cal realities to which he had insisted he was immune.
“The reason for the plan negotiated between the Republicans and Democrats is that we need 60 votes in the Senate which are not there!” Trump said in one post, referring to the Senate rule that requires a supermajority — 60 votes — in the
100-member chamber to bring an issue to the floor for a vote.
The Republicans have a narrow 52-48 majority,
and need some Democratic votes to get most legislation passed.
The solution, Trump said, was either to elect more Republican senators in 2018,
the next midterm elections, “or change the rules now to 51%.”
“Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” Trump said.
The Twitter posts ran counter to a frenetic effort by the White House to portray the spending agree
ment as a major victory for the president, an argument Trump himself made just hours later in the Rose Garden when he declared, “This is what winning looks like.” He cited large spending increases for the military and border security contained in the measure, claiming that those resources were “enough money to make a down payment on the border wall,” despite the fact that the bill provides no funding for the structure.
It was a continuation of a public push by his advis- ers to counteract the notion that Trump had been forced into an agreement he dis-
likes. Mick Mulvaney, White House budget director, hast- ily arranged a conference call after Trump’s morning Twitter posts to claim vic- tory on the spending package and argue that the president had actually outfoxed Democrats who were eager for a shutdown.
“They wanted to try and make this president look like he could not govern,” Mulvaney told reporters. “They wanted to make this president look like he did not
know what he was doing, and he beat them on that at the very, very highest level.”
Democrats, Mulvaney added, “were desperate to show that we were not reasonable, and we completely destroyed that narrative by negotiating this deal. This is a huge victory for the president.”
But Democrats, who had celebrated what they saw as a victory after the budget vote, were quick to criticize Trump’s tweets.
“President Trump may not like what he sees in this budget deal, but it’s dangerous and irresponsible to respond by calling for a shutdown,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a ranking member of the appropriations committee.
“Hopefully, Republicans in Congress will do for the next budget what they did for this one: ignore President Trump’s demands, work with Democrats, and get it done.”