After Promising Dems He Would Not Blame Them For Shutdown, Trump Tweets, ‘Democrats Now Own The Shutdown!’
Just 10 days after telling Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would be “proud” to shut down the government and promising that he would not “blame” Democrats for a shutdown, as the New York Times reported, Donald Trump abruptly shifted course and directly blamed Democrats for what appeared to be an inevitable shutdown on Friday.
In a Twitter message posted shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on December 21, Trump declared, “The Democrats now own the shutdown!”
But in a meeting with Schumer and incoming Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on December 11, Trump told Schumer that he would be “proud” to cause a government shutdown over “border security,” telling Schumer, “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I won’t blame you for it.”
Trump insists that any spending bill to keep the government open must include funding for his desired wall along the United States-Mexico border. Democrats have said that a border wall will be an ineffective and wasteful measure, favoring other, less drastic and costly means of reforming immigration laws and procedures. The deadline for resolving the dispute and passing a spending bill that would avoid a shutdown is midnight on Friday night, as Time Magazine reported.
Watch Trump make his promise not to blame Democrats for a government shutdown in the video below, courtesy of the Associated Press.
In a poll released this week, nearly twice as many Americans said they would blame Republicans for a government shutdown than would blame Democrats, according to USA Today. While the USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed a sharp partisan divide on the issue, a smaller percentage of Republicans, 58 percent, said they would blame Democrats for a shutdown.
Among Democrats, 83 percent said that Republicans would shoulder the blame for a shutdown — a shutdown that on Friday Trump said would continue “for a very long time,” according to the Associated Press.
But even though 58 percent of Republicans said they blame Democrats if the government shuts down, about two-thirds of Republicans said that they support shutting down the government, according to the USA Today report on the poll, a seemingly puzzling contradiction. Among Democrats, 83 percent are against a shutdown, as are 56 percent of independents, according to the poll.
The spending bill, like any spending measure, is subject to a filibuster, meaning that it would require 60 votes to pass. There are only 51 Republicans currently in the Senate. “The bottom line is simple: The Trump temper tantrum will shut down the government, but it will not get him his wall,” Schumer said on Thursday, according to the Washington Post.
