Trump, Dems meet again on shutdown
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and congressional leaders remained far from agreement over his demand for money for a border wall after another White House meeting, an impasse that has blocked funding for many government operations and forced a partial shutdown now 2 weeks old.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic minority leader, said after the talks in the privacy of the White House Situation Room that Trump told the group he would be willing to keep the affected government agencies closed for “months or even years.”
“I did say that, absolutely I said that,” Trump told reporters later. “I don’t think it will, but I am prepared.” He added, “I hope it doesn’t go on even beyond a few more days.”
The Democrats insisted that negotiating over border security could only follow after funding and opening the quarter of the government that is now shuttered. “We really cannot resolve this until we open up government,” said the new House Speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. “We made that clear to the president.”
The president and top Democrats each put the burden on the other to end the stalemate. Neither appeared to feel much pressure from their respective supporters to give ground even as roughly 450,000 federal employees had to work without pay and another 380,000 are unpaid on furlough. But cracks have opened in support among Republicans in Congress for the president’s hard line.
Trump, speaking to reporters in the Rose Garden following the meeting, expressed more optimism than Pelosi and Schumer about resolving the shutdown impasse, possibly through meetings among aides that will continue through the weekend. Even so, he refused to budge from his demand, calling conditions at the border “a dangerous horrible disaster.”
“We’ve done a great job,” he said. “But you can’t really do the kind of job we have to do unless you have a major, powerful barrier.”
He added, “We won’t be opening (the government) until it’s solved.”
Trump suggested that he could declare a national emergency to build a wall unilaterally without congressional approval. “I may do it,” he said. “We could call a national emergency and build it very quickly. That’s another way to do it. But if we can do it through a negotiated process, that’s better.”
In recent days, White House aides had signaled openness to a compromise offering Democrats legal protections for socalled Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States illegally years ago as children, in exchange for more wall funding. But Trump, who has contradicted his aides several times, has not suggested such a trade and Democrats, now holding the leverage of their new House majority, have ruled it out.
As the shutdown has stretched on, Trump has dug in more firmly. Though Vice President Mike Pence complained this week that Democrats never responded to him over the holidays about a proposal reducing the funding demand to about $2.5 billion for wall construction, the president subsequently scoffed at the notion that he’d accept that amount — he blamed “fake news” for misportraying his position — and publicly stuck to his demand for $5.6 billion.
Democratic leaders, too, stuck to a hard line.
Late Thursday, hours after her election as speaker, Pelosi reiterated to reporters that a wall between countries is “an immorality.” Asked if Democrats would even give Trump a dollar for a border wall, she responded: “A dollar? Yeah. One dollar.”
She spoke after House Democrats, newly in charge of the chamber after eight years of Republican control, passed measures to reopen the government and to approve $1.3 billion for border security funding that explicitly ruled out spending on a wall.
But the Senate, which approved a similar proposal just over two weeks ago when Republicans assumed Trump would go along, won’t consider the two House bills. Wary of the White House’s mixed signals, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said the Senate won’t vote on any proposal until it’s clear Trump will sign it.
When Trump addressed reporters after the meeting with Democrats, McConnell was conspicuously missing among the Republican congressional leaders who flanked the president in the White House Rose Garden. A spokesman for McConnell said he would have attended had he been asked.
At one point last month before the shutdown Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, seemed to suggest Trump was backing off his wall money demand altogether, by claiming that he would be able to find the $5 billion he wanted in other government accounts.
Following a backlash from backers including conservative pundits Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who criticized Trump for caving, the president reversed course and said no to the package approved unanimously by the Senate, forcing the shutdown that began on Dec. 22.
Trump has attempted to put pressure on Democrats by claiming there is an ongoing “humanitarian crisis” at the border because of a wave of illegal immigrants, as well as an unsubstantiated influx of terrorists and criminals.
In his remarks to reporters, Trump falsely said his administration had “built a brand new wall in San Diego.” The border barriers there were first built in the 1990s. Customs and Border Protection has been upgrading some fencing, including a longplanned 14-mile stretch in western San Diego County on which construction began in June. Democrats have already agreed to appropriate money for that project and similar ones.