Skip to content

He couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag

Published by digby on January 20, 2018

He couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag</>
by digby

But then his base doesn’t really want him to make one:

President Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, came close to an agreement to avert a government shutdown over lunch on Friday, but their consensus broke down later in the day when the president and his chief of staff demanded more concessions on immigration, according to people on both sides familiar with the lunch and follow-up calls between Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer.

The negotiations between Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer, fellow New Yorkers who have known each other for years, began when the president called Mr. Schumer Friday morning, giving the White House staff almost no heads-up. In a lengthy phone conversation, both men agreed to seek a permanent spending deal rather than the stopgap measure being negotiated by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Less than an hour later, Mr. Schumer was meeting with Mr. Trump over cheeseburgers in the president’s study next to the Oval Office. The White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, was there, as was Mr. Schumer’s chief of staff, Mike Lynch.

As the meal progressed, an outline of an agreement was struck, according to one person familiar with the discussion: Mr. Schumer said yes to higher levels for military spending and discussed the possibility of fully funding the president’s border wall. In exchange, the president agreed to support legalizing young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Mr. Schumer left the White House believing he had convinced the president to support a short, three to four-day spending extension to finalize an agreement, which would also include disaster funding and health care measures.

Then everything fell apart.

By the end of the day, as midnight struck and the government officially shut down, senators continued talking and the White House issued a blistering statement that “Senate Democrats own the Schumer Shutdown.”

Mr. Trump, a one-time real-estate mogul whose book, “The Art of the Deal,” proclaimed his mastery of negotiation, has struggled at times to seal deals as president. He inserted himself into health care negotiations last March, only to see talks in the House collapse. In September, a dealmaking dinner with “Chuck and Nancy” — Mr. Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader — later devolved into angry recriminations. And he has so far failed to bring his promised trade talks to a close.

On Friday, when Mr. Schumer was back on the Hill, Mr. Trump called Mr. Schumer, a person familiar with the call said, and told him he understood they had agreed on a three-week spending deal, not three or four days. Mr. Schumer told the president, the person said, that Democrats would oppose a three-week measure because they saw it as a delaying tactic.

A White House official said that Mr. Schumer raised the possibility of a one or two-day extension, but Mr. Trump told Mr. Schumer to work out the details of a short-term measure with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.

A short time later Mr. Schumer called the president, the person said, but the conversation drove the pair even further apart. The immigration concessions from Democrats were not conservative enough, Mr. Trump told Mr. Schumer. The president said he needed more border security measures as well as more enforcement of illegal immigration in parts of the country far from the border.

As the evening wore on, Mr. Schumer got a call from Mr. Kelly that dashed all hopes for a Trump-Schumer deal before the shutdown deadline of midnight. Mr. Kelly, a hard-liner on immigration, the person familiar with the call said, outlined a long list of White House objections to the deal.

A White House official familiar with the call said Mr. Kelly urged Mr. Schumer to work out the details of an agreement with Mr. McConnell.

In a tweet at 9:28 p.m., Mr. Trump vented his pessimism on Twitter, returning to his administration’s efforts to try to make sure that Democrats receive the blame from voters angry about a government shutdown exactly one year from his inauguration.

“Not looking good for our great Military or Safety & Security on the very dangerous Southern Border,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Dems want a Shutdown in order to help diminish the great success of the Tax Cuts, and what they are doing for our booming economy.”

With talks between Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer over, Republicans in the Senate scheduled a vote on a House-passed measure that leaders in both parties expected to fail.

the invitation for Mr. Schumer to come to the White House for a face-to-face with the president had been a heart-stopping moment for conservatives that conjured up their worst fears: a closed-door deal between Mr. Trump and the wily Democrat.

With Mr. Trump impatient to begin a golf-and-fund-raising weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, there was once again the prospect that the president would publicly side with his Democratic adversaries, who refused to fund the government unless Congress passed legislation to protect the Dreamers.

Privately, Mr. Trump’s impulses had led him to ignore political protocols and his own Republican allies, like Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Mr. McConnell, who had groused about the president in recent days that the Senate would consider an immigration bill “as soon as we figure out what he is for.”

The lack of any success between Mr. Schumer and Mr. Trump was a failure of what might have been.

Once, in the days after the 2016 election, Mr. Schumer saw a path toward working with Mr. Trump. Just as Mr. McConnell did at the time, Mr. Schumer believed he would be able to guide Mr. Trump — who has few fixed positions — toward his own initiatives.
[…]
In the wake of the failed negotiations on Capitol Hill and at the White House, Democrats predicted that the public would blame Mr. Trump and his Republican allies for a government shutdown, citing past examples of political stalemates in which voters punished Republican presidents and lawmakers.

Throughout the day, Mr. Trump told aides that he knows he is going to get blamed for the shutdown, regardless of what happens and how it goes down.

They had more than one bipartisan deal on the table that could have passed both houses. Trump said no. The government is now shut down. Mitch McConnell couldn’t even muster 50 GOP votes much less the addition ten Democrats he needed to break the filibuster. Only essential workers will be working until this is ended. And who knows when that will be?

He didn’t understand the deal and is clearly being led around by the nose by the hardliners. But he also only cares about his base. Maybe it’s time that we recognize and deal with the fact that they want him to deport the DREAMers and ban Muslims and throw black people in jail.

That’s the kind of people they are. He knows this. They want a white America. That’s what this is about.

Maybe it’s time to recognize that Trump’s racist, xenophobic agenda is for real and he has a party that’s ready to help him implement it.

.

Published inUncategorized