Trump Again Caves, This Time for Even Less Wall Money (Art of the Deal, Folks)
President Trump shut down the government for a record 35 days because he refused to sign a spending bill with less than $5.7 billion appropriated for his proposed Mexican border wall. On Wednesday, CNN reported that the president will begrudgingly sign a bipartisan bill that will prevent the government from re-entering a shutdown at the end of this week. The new bill only includes $1.375 billion for 55 miles of fencing.
“Am I happy? The answer is no, I’m not. I’m not happy,” Trump said of the deal during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. He went on to maintain that “it’s all going to happen” and “we’re going to build a beautiful, big, strong wall.” The president also said that shutting down the government and depriving 800,000 federal workers of their paychecks was worth it “because people learned … about the problems coming in from the southern border.”
On Tuesday night, Trump indicated in a tweet that he would sign the deal before Friday’s deadline.
Link to tweet
On Wednesday morning, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to tamp down reports that the president planned to sign the deal. “We want to see what the final piece of legislation looks like,” she said. “It’s hard to say definitively whether or not the president’s going to sign it until we know everything that’s in it.” Around the same time Sanders was speaking with reporters on the White House lawn, NBC joined CNN in reporting that Trump was “inclined” to sign the bipartisan deal.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-border-wall-funding-794159/
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