Congressman startled by Trump’s ideas on border
WASHINGTON — Congressman Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen left a White House meeting on the 26day-old government shutdown Wednesday questioning President Donald Trump’s grasp of border issues, calling his comments “crazy” and “irrational.”
He also reported zero progress in Trump’s meeting with a half-dozen Democratic members of the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus.”
“He has not gotten off the notion of physical structure,” Gonzalez said about Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for border wall construction in 2019. “He seems to be dug in pretty deeply.”
The meeting in the White House situation room came a day after Democratic leaders in Congress spurned an invitation from Trump to negotiate an end to the shutdown with a group of party moderates.
While some Democrats suspect Trump of trying to split off members of their party to gain leverage in the border wall budget standoff, Gonzalez said he felt obligated to accept the White House invitation.
“I felt like at a very minimum I had a responsibility to sit with him and try to find common ground,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders issued a statement praising the meeting.
“The president and his team had a constructive meeting with bipartisan members of the problem solvers caucus,” she said. “They listened to one another and now both have a good understanding of what the other wants. We look forward to more conversations like this.”
But Gonzalez, a secondterm congressman, said he was startled by some of Trump’s remarks on the border in his home town of McAllen, which the president visited last week. “He mentioned some pretty radical things about how he perceives the border region, which are completely irrational,” Gonzalez said. “One thing that I gathered when I walked out is that he really believes this. I was kind of shocked, because some of it is just so crazy. Just crazy stuff. That is not the way the border region really is.”
Gonzalez said he is reluctant to publicize specifics of the president’s comments, but he described them as “bizarre” and exaggerated portrayals of a porous border and how criminal traffickers operate there.
While Trump has referred to the border region as a “humanitarian and security crisis,” some Texas border officials, including McAllen Mayor Jim Darling, say the area is experiencing less crime than it has in decades.
“He certainly does not have a sense of the reality of the border,” Gonzalez said. “It’s still quite complicated. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be paying $10,000 to get into the United States.”
“He says a lot of things without evidence, statistics or numbers,” Gonzalez continued. “It’s shocking. But I was under the impression, for the first time, that he really believes these things. He lives in ‘baseland.’ That’s what his base tells him.”
Gonzalez said Trump also repeated his view that most of the 800,000 government workers who are furloughed or working without pay are Democrats.
“I don’t think the Border Patrol and Customs agents and a lot of law enforcement — those might be Republicans, and after a few missed paychecks they might start feeling the pinch and start putting pressure on their members and the administration,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s district has 8,869 federal employees, including large contingents of workers with Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration and produce inspectors with the U.S. Agriculture Department.
“I have Border Patrol agents, his own base, calling me and asking me to see what we can do to come to an agreement to open the government, so they can start receiving their paychecks,” he said.
Gonzalez, a critic of Trump’s border wall plan, said he pitched the idea of reopening the government for at least 30 days to continue negotiations. “That’s something both sides should easily be able to agree to,” he said.
Despite Trump’s hard line posture with congressional Democrats, Gonzalez said the administration appears to be feeling the pressure of the shutdown, now in its third week.
“I do believe that even though he tried to play this tough guy act, that ‘Hey, we can keep the government closed as long as we need,’ I don’t believe that’s the way they genuinely feel, or I don’t think we would have been there,” Gonzalez said.
He said the White House strategy appears to be to convince rank-and-file Democrats to push party leaders to reopen the government on Trump’s terms — something he sees as unlikely.
As for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gonzalez dismissed any suggestion that the Problem Solvers Caucus was trying to negotiate with Trump behind her back.
“I’m honest with her,” Gonzalez said. “I tell her what I believe and give her my opinion. I let her know that I was going. But at the end of the day I represent a border district that’s highly impacted, and it was important for me to be there.”
“He certainly does not have a sense of the reality of the border. It’s still quite complicated. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be paying $10,000 to get into the United States.” Congressman Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen