The man seems addicted to making everyone’s lives more difficult.
After weeks of rancorous division, Democrats and Republicans finally seemed on the verge of striking a large-scale budget deal that would satisfy some of the spending demands of both sides while punting on the hot-button immigration issues that had caused the division in the first place.
That is, until the deal-maker-in-chief opened his mouth.
At a roundtable that focused on America’s foremost menace, MS-13, President Trump said, “If we don’t get rid of these loopholes… let’s have a shutdown, we’ll do a shutdown, and it’s worth it for our country. I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of.”
By “this stuff,” Trump was referring to long-standing American law. As Democrats and Republicans have gone back and forth on a potential deal to protect DACA recipients from deportation, the White House has been pushing its own immigration framework, which involves over $20 billion for a border wall, sharp cuts to family-linked immigration, the end of the visa lottery, and an eventual path to citizenship for Dreamers.
That proposal was a nonstarter for Democratic leadership and many Republicans. And with Senate-crafted alternatives meeting with stiff White House resistance, the most likely scenario seemed to be a budget deal paired with an extension of DACA eligibility coupled with modest security spending, leaving that crucial immigration fight for another day.
But Trump, at least for now, seems determined not to agree to anything unless he gets everything he wants.
The president had already been in demagogue mode earlier Tuesday; in a pair of tweets, he noted that a drunk driver who killed an ex-NFL player was an illegal immigrant.
