Trump calls Democrats the ‘DO NOTHING PARTY’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, increasingly in re-election mode, on Thursday labeled Democrats the “DO NOTHING PARTY!” a day after their leaders accused him of being unprepared for a meeting on an infrastructure plan and simply “taking a pass” on the issue.
But even as the president suggested deal-making on major legislation is frozen until House Democrats’ probes end, a White House official signaled talks on bills that must pass to avert another full or partial government shutdown will continue.
Trump pressed Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California during a Wednesday Cabinet Room meeting to drop House Democrats’ probes of his 2016 campaign and business activities, saying if the investigations continued there would be no infrastructure deal. He later told reporters — after storming out of the meeting — that his White House would cease all negotiations with lawmakers after she assured him she would not order her committee chairs to stand down — though an aide later walked that back a bit.
The president took to Twitter Thursday morning, as the cable news shows discussed the presidential walkout, and said Democrats “are getting nothing done in Congress.” And his top spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told CNN that Democrats are “incapable of doing anything but investigate the president” and being unable to “do two things at once.”
Sanders called it “lunacy” for Pelosi to hold a meeting with her caucus about impeachment against her boss hours before the infrastructure meeting then showing up at the White House “like nothing happened.”
Even though he pulled the plug on a plan to update the country’s roads, bridges, airports, tunnels and seaports — and presented an immigration reform plan last week that his top aides admitted had no Democratic support — Trump claimed in another tweet that Democrats’ efforts are “about a Re-Do of the Mueller Report, which didn’t turn out the way they wanted. It is not possible for them to investigate and legislate at the same time.”