December 4, 2023

Trump just fired off a wild, whiny Twitter tantrum attacking both parties over his wall

President Trump began his Christmas weekend by launching into a wild, multi-tweet outburst aimed at both Senate Democrats and Republicans in a lazy and half-hearted attempt to bully the opposition into giving him the funding for the border wall that he promised Mexico would pay for.

With the federal government on the brink of running out of money, a stop-gap funding measure must be passed or the government will shut down — but Trump has refused to sign the measure presented to him by Congress until he gets his wall money, which Democrats refuse to give him.

That means that hundreds of thousands of federal workers will go without paychecks during the holiday season just because Donald Trump cares more about his ineffective and absurdly expensive monument to his xenophobia than he does about the people who make our government function.

The ironic thing about his attempts to blame the Democrats is that Trump is on the record owning the shutdown himself, having publicly told incoming Speaker Pelosi (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) just a week ago that “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”

Which, of course, is why Trump is now blaming them for it.

The president finished his tirade with an appeal to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, asking him to pull the “nuclear option” and remove the filibuster, which would allow the Senate to pass the wall-funding bill with just 50 votes instead of the 60 that it currently needs — which McConnell certainly won’t do, for fear of what might happen should the Democrats retake the Senate in 2020.

Needless to say, even Republicans are not pleased with the President. “He essentially threw everybody under the bus,” complained Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) to VICE. “What members are concerned about – particularly members from red districts – is, are they going to be blamed for this and is the White House going to throw them under the bus?”

Anyone familiar with Trump knows that he will blame anyone and everything he possibly can to avoid having to take any responsibility for himself, and so now Mitch McConnell is just as much in the crosshairs as Schumer is.

Capping off an explosive week which saw the president make major unilateral decisions like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan and provoked open outrage among the political establishments of both parties, Trump is running out of political capital to spend — and now he’s backed himself into a corner that could have dramatic repercussions.

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.