During a meeting involving Republican President Donald Trump, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and several other Congressional leaders at the White House on Friday, the president reportedly asked why so many people wanted him out of office.
The meeting had taken place in order to begin negotiations anew regarding re-opening the federal government. A partial government shutdown has been in place since December 22, when bills to continue funding the government failed to reach the president’s desk after Trump said he wouldn’t sign anything that didn’t include funding for building a border wall between the United States and Mexico.
At times during the Friday meeting, it appeared that Trump had gone off-topic, asking about lawmakers threatening him with articles of impeachment, reported CBS News over the weekend.
“Why does everyone want to impeach me, Nancy?” Trump allegedly asked Pelosi during the meeting, according to a source who was privy to the exchange.
Pelosi assured the president that no one wanted to impeach him. The sentiment wasn’t 100 percent accurate, however, as a handful of individuals within the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives have pushed for impeaching Trump for myriad reasons, some stemming from findings discovered during the ongoing Russia investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller. The issue is not yet a mainstream opinion of the party at-large, however.
President Trump asked Pelosi during a meeting: “Why does everyone want to impeach me, Nancy?” https://t.co/EblXi6w2Kn pic.twitter.com/Jr6MDWOoPx
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 5, 2019
Trump also continually hammered the idea of needing a wall for border security during the meeting, bringing up other walls around the world, including at the Vatican City, an apparent attempt to appeal to Pelosi’s Catholic faith.
“The Vatican has walls. The Vatican has walls surrounding the city. You like the Vatican, Nancy?” Trump said to the speaker.
“Let’s change the subject, sir,” Pelosi responded.
The Vatican does indeed have a border wall around it, a remnant of 9th-century architecture. Today, however, those walls serve little purpose, and there are almost no restrictions for who can or cannot enter the tiny nation.
“It isn’t all surrounded by walls, and it’s not like you need a separate visa or a passport to enter,” Gerard Mannion, Catholic Studies professor at Georgetown University, said in a 2016 interview, according to reporting from Vox .
Trump made other extreme comments during the meeting on Friday, previous reporting from the Inquisitr noted. Democrats came out of the meeting telling the media that Trump had threatened to make the shutdown a long-lasting event if future negotiations failed to deliver him a border wall. The president said that the shutdown could last “months or even years,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
Trump later confirmed those remarks in his own statement to the media following the meeting.
“I did say that. Absolutely, I said that,” he told reporters who asked him about the exchange.
