Trump Celebrates His First Year in Office By Blowing Yet Massive Another Deal
Late Friday night, the U.S government shut down. While this looked inevitable to basically everyone, politicians in D.C. were working furiously all night to come up with something they could pass. A shutdown, after all, would be a tremendous embarrassment for Donald Trump and the Republicans, since at no point in U.S. history has a party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House and still failed to keep the government running.
Here's how desperate the situation is: Trump cancelled his vacation. He was scheduled to go to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to celebrate the anniversary of his inauguration, and it's well established that the president needs his "me time." So in a last ditch effort to keep the government and his vacation from grinding to a halt, Trump tried on Friday to strike a deal on his own with Chuck Schumer, the ranking Democrat in the Senate.
And according to the New York Times, over the course of the day and night they very nearly worked out a compromise that protected DACA recipients. Unfortunately, Trump tends to agree most with whoever he last spoke to, and in the White House he's surrounded by his extremist anti-immigrant advisors, like Stephen Miller and John Kelly. Per the Times:
With talks between Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer over, Republicans in the Senate scheduled a vote on a House-passed measure that leaders in both parties expected to fail. After the shutdown began, Mr. Schumer lamented the failure to reach a deal with the president, and blamed Mr. Trump for abandoning an agreement that was within reach.
“What happened to the President Trump who asked us to come up with a deal and promised to take the heat for it?” Mr. Schumer asked on the Senate floor. “What happened to that President Trump?”
It's worth repeating that it was entirely Trump's decision to end protection for DACA recipients, claiming that the pending deportation of 800,000 tax-paying and law-abiding residents would light a fire under Congress to grant them some kind of permanent status. And while Congress has shamefully been dragging its feet to find a solution, Trump has still been hamstringing them the entire time.
So here we are, one year into the Trump presidency, with the government shut down and Trump no doubt fuming that he can't go to his clubhouse for chocolate cake. Happy anniversary, Mr. President.
