As the shutdown stretches on into its third week, new details have been surfacing about the meeting held between Donald Trump and Congressional Democrats last week, and it turns out that the wall wasn’t the only thing he was thinking about during that contentious showdown.
It was this meeting — the second one that week — in which the President said he would continue the government shutdown for “months or even years” if the Democrats failed to give him what he wanted. At that time, the concept of declaring a national emergency in order to appropriate funding from elsewhere to build the wall was just beginning to coalesce, however, and it’s hard to tell whether Trump considered the irony of contrasting the declaration of an emergency with something he was willing to drag out as long as necessary.
An emergency, of course, is something that must be addressed immediately. As MSNBC’s Ari Melber pointed out:
If you can delay it, schedule it, or decide later whether or not it exists … it’s probably not an emergency.
— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) January 11, 2019
Nevertheless, Trump has been committed to using either an emergency or the opposite of an emergency to get what he wants. After telling CBS’ Major Garrett that “I did say that. Absolutely, I said that” in response to whether he had actually threatened the “months/years” statement, he of course went back to the possibility of an emergency declaration.
But in the meeting with Democrats, Trump nearly derailed the entire conversation by bringing up a subject that was also on everyone’s mind — impeachment — after Representative Rashida Tlaib was seen on video making a pronouncement about doing just that. According to a source in the room, Trump asked her,
Why does everyone want to impeach me, Nancy?”
The question clearly wasn’t more than rhetorical: His Twitter account answered his own question with a series of declarations of how well he’s doing as President, and he concluded that Democrats wanted to impeach him because he had been, in fact, too successful:
As I have stated many times, if the Democrats take over the House or Senate, there will be disruption to the Financial Markets. We won the Senate, they won the House. Things will settle down. They only want to impeach me because they know they can’t win in 2020, too much success!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2019
That’s actually not how impeachment works, but we are not entirely convinced that Donald Trump understands how anything in government works at this point.
Featured image via screen capture
