President Trump banged his fists against a table and stormed out of a White House meeting Tuesday after assembled Democrats once again refused his demand for a taxpayer-funded border wall with Mexico, according to people in the room.
The barely 30-minute long Situation Room sit-down — convened in hopes of hashing out an end to the government shutdown now in its 19th day — ended abruptly after Trump “sort of slammed the table” and left when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told him Dems won’t entertain his $5.7 billion wall demand, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
“He just got up and said we had nothing to discuss and he just walked out,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters outside the White House. “Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn’t get his way.”
At the outset of the meeting, Trump tried to facilitate a more pleasant atmosphere, passing out candy to attendants as a gesture of “how kind he is,” a congressional source briefed on the matter told the Daily News.
But that evidently went south, as Pelosi told Trump her party won’t bankroll a wall even if he agreed to promptly end the shutdown.
“Bye-bye,” Trump then told the room and walked out, according to the source.
Dems want Trump to sign a bipartisan measure previously championed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that would fully reopen eight of the shuttered Cabinet departments and fund the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8 on current spending levels.
Trump has refused since the legislation doesn’t include wall cash, forcing some 800,000 federal employees to work without pay or not work at all.
Pelosi ripped the silver spoon-fed President for being out of touch with the furloughed workers. “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money, but they can’t,” she said.
Later in the day, House Democrats — joined by eight Republicans — passed a bill to reopen the Treasury Department, the IRS and other agencies as a new piecemeal strategy to put pressure on Trump and the GOP. But the bill is unlikely to move forward, as McConnell says he won’t put anything up for a vote that Trump doesn’t commit to signing.
While Pelosi and Schumer addressed reporters outside the White House, Trump took to his favorite medium to provide his side of Wednesday’s scuttled rendezvous.
“Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time,” Trump tweeted. “I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”