Long before his presidential run, dealmaking was central to Donald Trump’s public persona. “Deals are my art form,” he once proclaimed. “Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” But the great negotiator has consistently proven to be stunningly inept at negotiating. And now, with Democrats refusing to give in to his ceaseless demands for billions in border-wall funding, he’s flat-out admitting he has no desire to even try.
In a predictably meandering interview with The New York Times on Thursday, the president said that while he’ll give a bipartisan committee of 17 negotiators until the February 15 deadline to come up with a border-security agreement, he has no confidence in the panel, and is laying the groundwork to go it alone. “I think it’s a waste of time,” he said of negotiations, signaling that he plans to bypass Congress and declare a national emergency to build his wall.
“I’ve set the table,” he told the Times. “I’ve set the stage for doing what I’m going to do.”
“Based on what I hear and based on what I read, they don’t want to give money for the wall,” he added, of Democrats. “If [Nancy Pelosi] doesn’t approve a wall, the rest of it’s just a waste of money and time and energy because it’s, it’s desperately needed. People are flowing in.”
The bipartisan panel, which convened this week, already had an ambitious mandate: to somehow bridge a divide between Trump, who is digging in his heels over wall funding, and Democrats, who have no reason or desire to give in to his tantrums. The president’s vote of no confidence Thursday seemingly doomed negotiations just as they ramped up, signaling that if he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll either close the government again—something Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, want desperately to avoid—or fall back on the nuclear option, which the White House has spent the week finalizing.
What happens after Trump pulls the trigger remains to be seen. It’s unclear whether declaring a national emergency to fund the wall is within his constitutional rights, and Democrats have already indicated they would challenge the move. Trump tried to project confidence about the state of play, telling the Times that he has “set the table very nicely” by highlighting “the amount of crime, the amount of drugs, the amount of human trafficking, which can be stopped with a proper system.” But as a former senior administration official told Politico this week, invoking his executive powers “could be seen as subverting the Constitution for his own ego, and it will be the end of his presidency.” Trump may complain that Pelosi is “doing a tremendous disservice to the country,” but in fact, she may have out-maneuvered him again.
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