The president said he would build a wall anyway, if congressional negotiators fail to come up with a deal he finds acceptable.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said the odds congressional negotiators will craft a deal to end his border wall standoff with Congress are “less than 50-50.”
As hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers prepared to return to work, Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he doesn’t think the negotiators will strike a deal that he’d accept. He pledged to build a wall anyway using his executive powers to declare a national emergency if necessary.
“I personally think it’s less than 50-50, but you have a lot of very good people on that board,” Trump said in an interview Sunday with the newspaper.
The president was referring to a bipartisan committee of House and Senate lawmakers that will consider border spending as part of the legislative process.
The president’s standoff with Democrats on Capitol Hill is far from over and the clock is ticking. The spending bill Trump signed on Friday to temporarily end the partial government shutdown funds the shuttered agencies only until Feb. 15.
It’s unclear if the Democrats will budge. Trump seemed girded for battle over the weekend, sending out a series of online messages that foreshadowed the upcoming fight with lawmakers. “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!” he tweeted.
Is Trump prepared to shut down the government again in three weeks?
“Yeah, I think he actually is,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said. “He doesn’t want to shut the government down, let’s make that very clear. He doesn’t want to declare a national emergency.”
But Mulvaney said that at “the end of the day, the president’s commitment is to defend the nation and he will do it with or without Congress.”
The linchpin in the standoff is Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for his prized wall at the U. S.-Mexico border, a project Democrats consider an ineffective, wasteful monument to a ridiculous Trump campaign promise.
