Trump: He’ll ‘never back down’ in shutdown fight
He rejects idea to reopen government for several weeks
WASHINGTON — With the government mired in shutdown entering a fourth week, President Donald Trump rejected a shortterm legislative fix and dug in for more combat Monday, declaring he would “never ever back down.”
Trump rejected a suggestion to reopen all government departments for several weeks while negotiations would continue with Democrats over his demands for $5.7 billion for a long, impregnable wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The president also edged further away from the idea of trying to declare a national emergency to circumvent Congress.
“I’m not looking to call a national emergency,” Trump said. “This is so simple we shouldn’t have to.”
No cracks were apparent in the president’s deadlock with lawmakers after a weekend with no negotiations at all. His ruling out the short-term option proposed by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham removed one path forward, and little else was in sight.
Congressional Republicans were watching Trump for a signal for how to move next, and Democrats have not budged from their refusal to fund the wall and their demand that he reopen government before border talks resume.
The impact of the 24-day partial government closure was felt around the country. Some 800,000 federal workers missed paychecks, deepening anxieties about mortgage payments and unpaid bills, and about half of them were off the job, cutting off some services.
Trump spent the weekend in the White House reaching out to aides and lawmakers and tweeting aggressively about Democratic foes as he tried to make the case that the wall was needed on both security and humanitarian grounds. He stressed that argument repeatedly during a speech at a farming convention in New Orleans on Monday, insisting there was “no substitute” for a wall or a barrier along the southern border.
Trump has continued to insist he has the power to sign an emergency declaration to deal with what he says is a crisis of drug smuggling and trafficking of women and children at the border. But he now appears to be in no rush to make such a declaration.
Instead, he is focused on pushing Democrats to return to the negotiating table — though he walked out of the most recent talks last week — and seized on the fact that a group of House and Senate Democrats were on a retreat in Puerto Rico.
Democrats, he argued, were partying on a beach rather than negotiating — though Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were not on the trip.
He left their session at the White House last Wednesday after Pelosi told him she would not agree to fund the border wall even if he reopened the government. He called the meeting a “total waste of time.”
White House officials cautioned that an emergency order remains on the table. Many inside and outside the White House hold that it may be the best option to end the standoff, reopening the government while allowing Trump to tell his base supporters he didn’t cave on the wall.
But some GOP lawmakers — and White House aides — have counseled against it, concerned that an emergency declaration would be challenged in court.
Others have raised concerns about re-routing money from other projects, including money Congress approved for disaster aid. Lawmakers on both sides have warned that acting under an emergency order would set a troubling precedent for executive power.
Trump apparently sees value in his extended fight to fulfill a key campaign pledge, knowing that his supporters — who he’ll need to turn out in 2020 to win re-election — don’t want to see him back down.
The president devoted much of his hourlong address to the 100th annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation in New Orleans to defending his decision to hold out for billions of dollars to build a border wall.
Calling the wall necessary to cut down on illegal immigration, even though border crossings have fallen in recent years, he said that it would lead to immigration reform that would help farmers get the workers they need for their fields.
“You need people to help you with the farms,” Trump said. “It’s going to be easier for them to get in.”
With negotiations stuck, the White House is considering reaching out to rankand-file Democrats rather than just the leaders to see if they can build any consensus for the wall, though it’s uncertain whether any would respond.
Pelosi and Schumer remain the only ones with the power to make a deal.