President Trump on Tuesday vowed to block full funding for the government if Democrats refuse his demand for a border wall, saying he was “proud to shut down the government for border security” — an extraordinary statement that came during a televised altercation with Democratic congressional leaders.
“If we don’t have border security, we’ll shut down the government — this country needs border security,” Mr. Trump declared in the Oval Office, engaging in a testy back-and forth with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.
“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it,” Mr. Trump added, insisting on a public airing of hostilities even as the Democrats repeatedly asked him to keep their negotiating disputes private.
“It’s not bad, Nancy; it’s called transparency,” Mr. Trump snapped after one such interjection by Ms. Pelosi, who appeared to trigger the president’s temper when she raised the prospect of a “Trump shutdown” over what she characterized as an ineffective and wasteful wall.
.. “The American people recognize that we must keep the government open, that a shutdown is not worth anything, and that we should not have a Trump shutdown,” Ms. Pelosi said.
“A what?” Mr. Trump shot back.
.. It also showcased the interplay of two politicians playing to very different bases: Mr. Trump appealing to his core anti-immigration supporters and Ms. Pelosi to the young liberal lawmakers she needs to keep in her camp ahead of next month’s speaker election.
Outside the West Wing after the meeting Mr. Schumer said Mr. Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum” over the wall, saying: “The president made clear that he wants a shutdown.”
.. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi said it was up to Mr. Trump to avert the disaster he had promised, by embracing their proposals to essentially postpone the dispute for another year, either by passing the six noncontroversial budget measures that are outstanding and extending Homeland Security funding for one year at current levels, or passing one-year extensions for all seven remaining spending bills.
“We gave the president two options that would keep the government open,” they said in a statement. “It’s his choice to accept one of those options or shut the government down.”
Mr. Trump had begun the day appearing to soften his stance somewhat on the wall. In a series of morning tweets, he falsely stated that substantial sections of the “Great Wall” on the southwestern border that he has long championed have already been completed, and he suggested that his administration could continue construction whether Democrats fund it or not.
That would be illegal, but it suggested that he was looking for a way to keep the government funded past Dec. 21, even if Democrats balk at wall funding.
It quickly grew personal for Mr. Trump, who aides say respects what he sees as Ms. Pelosi’s strength as a negotiator and toughness in the political trenches, but who sought on Tuesday to publicly undercut her position by raising questions about her job security.
.. Mr. Trump’s approach to Mr. Schumer was initially friendly, but it soon turned sour...
“It is called funding the government, Mr. President,” a stern-faced Mr. Schumer said, going on to point out that Mr. Trump had made false statements about the effectiveness of the wall and how much of it had been built.
.. a brief shutdown in January when Democrats insisted that protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children must be part of any funding measure. “The last time that you did, you got killed.”
.. The president has suggested, repeatedly, that a shutdown might be necessary to compel Democrats to swallow $5 billion in wall funding. But on Tuesday morning before the meeting, he had appeared to be softening his stance.
.. the administration has yet to spend much of the $1.3 billion Congress approved for border security last year.
.. Under restrictions put in place by Congress, none of that money could be used to construct a new, concrete wall of the sort the president has said is vital.
The president does not have the legal authority to spend money appropriated for one purpose on another task, such as wall-building.
.. The president’s conservative allies in Congress have urged Mr. Trump to hold firm to his insistence on wall money, and use all means necessary to include additional immigration restrictions in the year-end package.
.. “Securing the border isn’t going to happen in a Pelosi-run Congress,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio and Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the co-founder and chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said in an op-ed Tuesday on the Fox News website. “We still have three weeks. That’s more than enough time to do what we said.”
That Christmas When the Trumps Saw Red
Here in New York we have a desperate, critical need to get a new train tunnel under the Hudson River. The existing ones are in terrible shape and if either ever has to be closed down, it’ll be a major blow to the economy of the city, the region and the country. So far Trump just hasn’t gotten on board. Reliable sources tell me it’s because he doesn’t want to pay a lot of money for something people can’t see.
.. Gail: I’ve always suspected that many conservatives hate mass transit because it just fundamentally offends their sense of individualism. That you can’t be the heroic American Man Who Rides Alone if you’re sitting in a car with 40 other people making multiple stops in New Jersey. But go on.
.. As for immigration, I liked our colleague Tom Friedman’s formulation from his column the other day: “A high wall with a big gate.” Not because I think the wall is such a great idea — the money would be better spent on personnel and technology, not concrete — but because I think it is a price worth paying for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, an expanded H1-B program for high-skilled immigrants and their spouses, and other steps to make immigration to the United States fairer, safer and easier for every law-abiding person who wants to come and make this a better country.
.. if we want to resolve the border issues, there’s also going to have to be a very big effort to fuel economic development in Central America. This really isn’t a problem about Mexicans anymore so much as impoverished refugees from the violence and hunger of countries like Honduras.
.. We need some version of a “Plan Colombia” for Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, modeled on the military and financial assistance the United States gave to Bogotá that successfully helped Colombians get the upper hand against insurgents and drug cartels. And that’s another one for the “good luck getting it past the president” file.
.. I do not dispute the science that climate change is happening and that much of it is man-made. And Trump and his administration should simply acknowledge the fact.
I’m less clear, say, that we should attribute events like the devastating forest fires to climate change alone as opposed to a host of additional causes, including too many people living in fire-prone areas (and often causing the fires), as well as poor forest-management practices.
.. I was reminded of this the other while reading a fascinating piece in The Times Magazine about the ecological devastation wrought by biofuels — which were seen as part of the climate-change cure just a few years ago. The riots in France sparked by the government’s climate-related hike to diesel fuel taxes are also a reminder that the term “climate sensitivity” should be a political term as well as an ecological one... It’s true that overdevelopment is one of the causes of the California fires — as well as all the terrible flooding in places like Florida and Texas. Interesting that the president never mentions that... We could do a lot to discourage people from living in places they shouldn’t be in the first place, for instance by ending or reforming the National Flood Insurance Program... The ethanol subsidies have been a fiasco. Cap-and-trade systems are prone to corruption. A carbon tax probably makes the most sense but tends to be regressive. My own view is that reinvesting in nuclear plants makes the most sense from an environmental and technological point of view, so long as you can reform the regulatory picture to make them economical... One of the reasons I’m in the “Do something” camp is because there are plenty of strategies that would be helpful even if they didn’t turn out to do much over the long run for the global warming. We already mentioned mass transit, controlling overdevelopment of beaches and other fragile areas. Reducing car emissions makes the air better. Encouraging the solar heating industry and wind power gives us an economic boost... I’m mildly cheered that he has almost prevented a disaster he needlessly caused... Melania. And Melania’s taste. For reasons I don’t quite get, liberals and conservatives seem to have made some kind of tacit pact not to criticize her or her choices as first lady. They weren’t so kind to Hillary Clinton.
Fact Checking President Trump’s Wild Daily Caller Interview
Here’s a quick roundup of the president’s most notable errors of fact, in the order in which he made them.
“You know, it’s very interesting, because when you talk about not Senate confirmed, well, [special counsel Robert] Mueller’s not Senate confirmed. He’s heading this whole big thing; he’s not Senate confirmed.”
Trump is responding to assertions that he violated the Constitution by appointing the Justice Department’s chief of staff, Matthew G. Whitaker, as acting attorney general. The chief of staff post is not subject to Senate confirmation, unlike the deputy attorney general, who ordinarily would fill the vacancy.
But there is no expectation that a special counsel would be subject to Senate confirmation, as he is an “inferior officer” who reports to someone who has been confirmed. (The former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself, so Mueller previously had reported to the deputy attorney general.)
In other words, Trump’s point is nonsensical.
“I’m building the wall in smaller stages, and we moved the military there, we put up barbed wire, we did all sorts of things.”
No, Trump’s wall is not yet being built. Congress inserted specific language in its appropriations bill that none of the $1.57 billion appropriated for border protection may be used for prototypes of a concrete wall that Trump observed while in California. The money can be used only for bollard fencing and levee fencing. Trump regularly makes this false claim — at last count, more than 80 times.
“You have 17 people — half, many of them worked for Hillary Clinton, some on the foundation. The Hillary Clinton Foundation.”
This is false, as we have documented previously. Five members of the Mueller team contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. One of those people, attorney Jeannie Rhee, represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 lawsuit over Clinton’s use of her private email server. Aaron Zebley, a former counterterrorism FBI agent and assistant U.S. attorney, made no contributions to Clinton but represented a Clinton aide at one point.
In other words, no member of the Mueller team worked for Hillary Clinton and only one had a connection to the Clinton Foundation.
“We’ve really, you know, terminated a lot of the Obamacare, as it was referred to.”
The 2017 Trump tax bill, starting in 2019, effectively eliminates the mandate that required people to pay a penalty if they chose not to buy health insurance. (A waiver was available for people under a certain income level.) The penalty must still be paid in 2017 and 2018.
“This is a problem in California that’s so bad of illegals voting. This is a California problem, and if you notice, almost every race — I was watching today — out of like 11 races that are in question, they’re going to win all of them. The Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time.”
Trump, without evidence, suggests that the slow process of counting California’s mail-in ballots means that undocumented immigrants are casting votes. He has never given an explanation as to why the late votes that are counted would be from undocumented immigrants. There is no evidence that undocumented immigrants are voting in California in vast numbers, let alone enough to swing an election.
Voter fraud is extremely rare, though obviously errors can be made. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles acknowledged in October that 1,500 people may have been incorrectly registered because of a processing error — including at least one noncitizen (a legal resident, not an undocumented immigrant). The incorrect registrations were canceled before the election.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace, what’s going on.”
Report warns Trump’s wall could cost more, take longer and underperform
Cost estimates have been all over the place, including $18 billion for 722 miles of barriers in 17 priority areas identified by Customs and Border Protection and $70 billion by Senate Democrats.
.. On the Aug. 1 Rush Limbaugh program, he said: “I say, ‘Hey, if you have a shutdown, you have a shutdown.’ Now, the shutdown could also take place after the election. I happen to think it’s a great political thing, because people want border security.”