Donald?
They ain’t gonna give you the wall money….
They will come and sit down with ya…
No problem….
But they ain’t gonna let you off the hook….
It’s YOUR shutdown….
You told everybody to ‘Enjoy the Ride’……
Oh, and your party members who are standing beside ya?
What are they gonna tell the federal employee’s in their states and district that go on TV and tell how they can’t feed their kids and pay their rent because YOU Congressman….Have Donald Trump …The multimillionaires back?
President Donald Trump stormed out of a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders and rallied the Senate GOP to his position on the border wall on Wednesday, raising the prospects for the longest government shutdown of all time and increased speculation that Trump could soon declare a national emergency.
After speaking with Senate Republicans, the president cut short his meeting with Democratic and Republican leaders after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she would not fund his border wall regardless of when the government reopens. The president tweeted the meeting was a “total waste of time.”
“The president stomped out of the meeting when he said to me, ‘Will you support a wall?’ and I said no. Now they’re trying to mischaracterize what he actually said,” Pelosi said of GOP leaders. “It was a petulant president of the United States.”
Trump made clear to Democrats that “there will be no deal without a wall,” said Vice President Mike Pence. It was the third such bipartisan meeting in a week, all of which were unproductive. But this was the shortest, clocking in at about 30 minutes.
In the bipartisan meeting, Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Trump, Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did almost all the talking, according to a person briefed on it.
The president also remained equally defiant in a lunchtime huddle with Senate Republicans on Wednesday, insisting GOP lawmakers are unified behind him even as some GOP senators push for the shutdown to end. Taken together, the two meetings suggest that the government shutdown, already on its 20th day, could drag long into January. The longest shutdown in recent history was 21 days in the 1990s.
Both Democratic and Republican sources questioned the episode Wednesday afternoon, wondering whether Trump had staged the entire meeting to try to make Democratic leaders look unreasonable and better position himself to make an emergency declaration in the coming days.
The president said he has the authority to declare a national emergency but added he prefers not to do so, according to GOP senators who attended the lunch. Trump also said he believes federal unions will put more pressure on Democrats to come to the table, though those unions have largely backed Democratic leaders’ position.
“We have a very, very unified party,” Trump told reporters after the meeting.
Yet Trump faced some blowback in the meeting with his party. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who is uncomfortable with the GOP holding steady behind Trump’s border wall demands during the shutdown, said she advocated reopening the government and negotiating on border security later.
“When the government is shut down there are consequences and people are starting to feel those consequences,” she said….
image…Alex Wong/Getty