Don squawks but OKs $1.3 trillion budget
PRESIDENT TRUMP signed a $1.3 trillion budget into law Friday — but he wasn’t happy about it.
The President had threatened to veto the legislation his White House had signed off on a day earlier, complaining that it didn’t address “Dreamer” immigrants and didn’t have enough cash for his long-promised Mexican border wall.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal he was talked out of doing so by aides who warned him he’d be blamed for shutting down the government on a weekend when he was jetting off to his Florida estate. “F--- that,” Trump reportedly replied.
Trump told reporters he was forced to sign the “ridiculous” 2,232-page bill — which he admitted he hadn’t even read — because he wants to “keep America safe.”
“There are a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things we shouldn’t have had in this bill but we were, in a sense, forced if we want to build our military,” Trump said during a ceremony he’d billed as a press conference at the White House. “But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it.”
The announcement came hours after he confused both Republicans and Democrats by tweeting that he was “considering a VETO” on the massive spending bill because he claimed Democrats had “abandoned” the immigrants protected by the Obamaera Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
“I say this to DACA recipients: the Republicans are with you, they want to get your situation taken care of,” Trump said. “The Democrats just fought every single inch of the way. They did not want DACA in this bill.”
But Trump’s the one who rescinded DACA upon entering office. Since then, he has refused to consider several bipartisan deals to reinstate the program, which protects some 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, in return for cash for his border wall.
Immigrant advocates ripped Trump’s apparent hypocrisy.
“This is your mess,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement addressed to Trump. “You ended DACA, you’ve sabotaged every effort to fix it, and now you want to blame ... Congress?”
Trump — who’d hailed the deal Thursday — went on to tout the new spending bill’s $655 billion in military spending as a necessity that enshrines the U.S. armed forces as “by far the strongest in the world.”
But the President soured on the $1.6 billion earmarked for his contentious border wall, saying that it’s not enough.
“Not happy with $1.6 billion, but it does start the wall and we’ll make that $1.6 billion go very far,” Trump said.
After promising throughout the campaign that Mexico would pay for the behemoth border barrier,