President Donald Trump probably won’t be satisfied with any deal Capitol Hill negotiators come up with he admitted Thursday, even in the long-shot event lawmakers agree on a solution to defuse the immigration standoff that shut down the government.
Trump said he will likely go ahead and use his executive power to build his border wall anyway, in comments that could badly undercut compromise talks between lawmakers.
Trump called the consultations between Democrats and Republicans from the House and the Senate “a waste of time,” in an interview with The New York Times published Thursday night.
“I’ve set the table. I’ve set the stage for doing what I’m going to do,” Trump said, without specifically confirming that he plans to declare a national emergency and reprogram money already offered by Congress for other purposes.
Such a step, or some other executive action, would set off a constitutional showdown and a certain legal challenge over whether the President would be claiming power he does not have to usurp Congress’s prerogative to appropriate funds.
Trump’s warning came amid few signs of progress from the Capitol Hill talks and after he lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, accusing her of “playing games” because of her refusal to fund a wall he always said Mexico would pay for.
“If there’s no wall, it doesn’t work,” Trump said before a group of reporters in the Oval Office earlier on Thursday, accusing Pelosi of “playing games” over her refusal to fund his wall — the most tangible promise of his 2016 White House campaign.
“On February 15, the committee will come back and if they don’t have a wall, I don’t even want to waste my time reading what they have because it’s a waste of time,” Trump said
Pelosi has been playing tough, but at one point seemed to offer Trump a semantic way out of the impasse, during her time in front of reporters on Thursday.
“There’s not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” Pelosi said, while adding that she could support a solution to the showdown that added some Normandy fencing — large ‘X’ shaped barriers — on the border.
“If the President wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall,” Pelosi said.
Flexibility with language and creative drafting of legislation is a time honored way to ease congressional disputes in a way that gives both sides a credible argument that they got a win. It’s not hard to see how such an approach could offer a face saving way out of the current showdown.
If Trump were to agree to consider funding for the refurbishment of existing sections of border wall instead of financing for new stretches, there could be wiggle room that congressional negotiators could work with.
One tweet by Trump on Thursday appeared to offer hope for such an outcome.
“Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go. Renovation of existing WALLS is also a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!” he tweeted.
But another missive seemed to send the opposite message.
“Let’s just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!” he added.
Trump’s interview with the Times appeared to drive another nail into optimism that a creative linguistic way could be charted out of the confrontation.