Just hours after caving in and agreeing to reopen the government for three weeks, President Trump returned to his threats.
The president announced that if he can’t get money for constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, he’ll declare a national emergency, something he’s repeatedly threatened during the shutdown.
“We’ll work with the Democrats and negotiate and if we can’t do that, then we’ll do a — obviously we’ll do the emergency because that’s what it is. It’s a national emergency,” he declared during a Friday afternoon meeting shortly after his Rose Garden speech announcing he’d accepted a deal with no wall funding.
That guarantee is further than Trump went in the earlier speech, when he said that if he doesn’t get the deal he wants “either the government will shut down on Feb. 15 again, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made it clear that he wasn’t going to get what he wants, however.
“Have I not been clear on the wall? No, I’ve been very clear on the wall,” she said in a Friday afternoon press conference.
With Trump’s major cave on Friday, he appeared to lose any remaining leverage he thought he had over Democrats to force a deal on border security to his liking.
