Overseeing the first major government shutdown on his watch, President Trump said Tuesday that he has no sense for when the departments that were shuttered will reopen — and said Democrats’ treatment of him has been “a disgrace.”
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Christmas morning, also continued to signal he’s shifted his rhetoric on his demand for a border wall, though he has not changed his demand for billions of dollars to build up to 550 miles of new or renovated barriers along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
Four days into the shutdown, Mr. Trump has attempted to negotiate, but it’s not clear there’s been any movement from Democrats, as both sides begin to ponder a shutdown that could last into the new year.
“It’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country. But other than that, I wish everybody a very Merry Christmas,” the president said.
The president has relented on his previous insistence that he wanted to build a “wall” on the southwest border, saying he now envisions the type of steel-slatted fence that was also built during the Obama and Bush administrations — and which many Democrats have voted to approve money for in the past.
Calling the construction “a wall” had sparked antipathy among Democrats — which Mr. Trump said was hypocritical.
“The only time they went against it, there was only one time: when Donald Trump said, ‘We want to build the wall,’” the president said. “As soon as I said, I want to build the wall, they were all against it.”
He compared that to Democrats’ approach to former FBI Director James B. Comey, whom Democrats had excoriated for supposedly costing Hillary Clinton the 2016 presidential election, only to lionize him when he began to take on Mr. Trump.
“The Democrats hated him, they were calling for his resignation, they were calling for his firing,” Mr. Trump said. “Once I fired him, everybody said, ‘Oh, why did you fire him? Why did you fire him?’”
The wall funding is the only major dispute standing between a deal to reopen the government and fund operations until Sept. 30, which is the end of the fiscal year. But the fight is big enough that nobody is predicting an easy resolution.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,” the president told reporters, insisting he won’t relent until there’s significantly more money added for “a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it.”
Congress isn’t even slated to be in session again until Thursday, having fled town Saturday, which was the first day of the shutdown. About 25 percent of discretionary government spending, spanning dozens of departments and agencies, has run out of money. That includes the Justice, Commerce, Interior and Homeland Security departments.
The effects of the shutdown have been muted so far, with the weekend followed by two federal holidays on Monday and Tuesday.
That changes Wednesday, which would be the first normal workday since the stopgap money Congress approved earlier this year ran out.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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