The Daily - The Latest Showdown Over a Shutdown

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

President Trump seemed poised to avoid a government shutdown and to carry his fight for a border wall into 2019, when the House will be controlled by Democrats. Then he shot down the spending deal. So what happened? Also, to cap off a chaotic day of breaking news, Jim Mattis resigned as secretary of defense. Guest: Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Watch. Today, President Trump seemed poised to avoid a government shutdown and carry his fight for a border wall into 2019 with a Democratic-controlled House. So what happened? And Jim Mattis has resigned as Secretary of Defense. It's Friday, December 21st.

Jonathan, it is 4.42 on Thursday afternoon. Are we again facing a government shutdown? We are. I came into work this morning thinking that it was going to be unpalatable, but the House Republicans were going to take up the Senate-passed bill that would have kept the government funded past Friday and punted it to February, and everyone would jump in their airplanes and leave Washington, and we would be on our way to winter break, and we're not. By my count, Jonathan,

this would be our third government shutdown. In a year. In a year. In a year. And each one of them seems to center around the president, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi arguing about a year. In a year. And each one of them seems to center around the president, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi arguing about a wall. And immigration, yes. Jonathan Weissman is deputy Washington editor of The Times.

Remember, the last one was over the Democrats insisting on some kind of protection for the dreamers. And that one actually went poorly for the Democrats. The Democrats pretty much capitulated and lost on that one. So how did we get here all over again? Well, remember, the actual fiscal year ended September 30th. And since then, we've been living on these stopgap spending bills that just keep the money flowing to the government. Now, the last stopgap spending bill was supposed to end a few weeks ago, but then George H.W. Bush died, and we didn't want to

have this kind of unseemly spectacle as we were celebrating the former president's life. So they passed yet another short-term spending bill that pushed us to the edge of Christmas, and here we are. So what happens after George H.W. Bush is laid to rest, the celebrations are over, and Washington does finally turn to the budget? Okay, thank you very much. It's a great honor to have Nancy Pelosi with us and Chuck Schumer with us. Well, that was a moment when President Trump summoned Nancy Pelosi, the expected next speaker, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, to the White House. And then we have the easy one, the wall. That'll be the one that will be the easiest of all. What do you think, Chuck? Maybe not? It's called funding the government, Mr. President.

So we're going to see. But I will tell you, the wall will get built. Now, he relishes this. He wanted to have a public fight over the wall right then. One way or the other, it's going to get built. I'd like not to see a government closing, a shutdown. We will see what happens over the next short period of time. But the wall is a very important thing to us. The cameras are rolling. This was supposed to be a closed-door negotiation. And he starts negotiating right there in front of the cameras. It doesn't matter, though, because we can't get it passed in the Senate because we need 10 Democrat votes. That's the problem. Let us have our conversation, then we can meet with the press again. But the fact is, is that legislating, which is what we do...

is what we do. The Democrats are looking around the corner. They want Donald Trump to take responsibility in case there is a shutdown coming. So they push him. 20 times you have called for, I will shut down the government if I don't get my will. None of us have said it. You want to know something?

And much to their surprise and delight, he says, yeah. Yes, if we don't get what we want want one way or the other, whether it's through you, through a military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government. And I am proud. And I'll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security. And John, why would the president happily, even proudly own a shutdown, something that historically every politician is desperate to avoid and to point the finger at someone else for. You know, Donald Trump looks at his core supporters and his core supporters were the ones who were listening to him when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, opened his campaign by saying that Mexico

was not sending their best. They were sending their rapists and their drug dealers. He knows who the people are, who are his unshakable supporters, and they care more about these immigration issues than anything else. He was playing to them. He wants them on his side. And he's looking ahead to Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House. And he understands this really is his last moment. This is when he has to fight. And his supporters want to see him go down swinging. Well, then isn't this a totally deadlocked situation at this point? If the president thinks shutting down the government over the wall might actually be good for him politically, and Schumer and Pelosi are telling him,

no way, we're not going to give in to you, doesn't that create a complete deadlock and there's no place for anyone to go? It looks like a complete deadlock because the Democrats have absolutely no incentive to give him that money. He's not offering them anything. Why in the world would they offer something back? But remember, you know, there are other actors here. In this case, the House Republicans, the Senate Republicans, they have been persuasive in the past. They've

been able to go to the president and say, look, Mr. President, it just doesn't work that way. You have to give in because you have no choice. And I think that's where we thought we were, that eventually they would talk him into it. And that is what seemed to be happening as we started getting toward this deadline, Sarah Huckabee Sanders comes out and she says, you know, at this point, the Senate's thrown out a lot of ideas. We're disappointed in the fact that they've yet to actually vote on something and pass something. So when they do that, we'll make a determination on whether or not we're going to sign that. In the meantime, we're looking at every avenue available to us possible. The president's

asked every one of his cabinet secretaries to look for funding that can be used to protect our borders. You know, we don't have to get the wall money right now. We can take money from other parts of the government. At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration. And we were all fairly sanguine about our Christmas breaks. Are there any senators in the chamber wishing to vote or change their vote? Right. And in response to that kind of new openness, the Senate passes a short-term spending bill, right?

All in favor, say aye. Aye. Those opposed, no. The ayes appear to have it. The ayes do have it. The motion is agreed to. That's right. And, you know, you would not think that Mitch McConnell, who is a wily guy,

would have gone and put a bill to keep the government funded past Friday night into February if he did not believe that Donald Trump would sign it. He's not that stupid. So I think that we were pretty sure he was going to sign this bill. that stupid. So I think that we were pretty sure he was going to sign this bill. Regardless of Republican pressure, why would he even consider a compromise? Because the Democrats take control of the House in a week or two. So doesn't it become exponentially more hard for the president to ever get his wall funded? Logically, you would think it's now or never. The Republicans are still in charge.

This is the only time you've got to get this wall. But there's this other thing whispering in Donald Trump's ear, which is, remember, Nancy Pelosi goes to him at the White House and says, hey, you're in control. The Republicans control the White House. They control the Senate. They control the Senate. They control the House. It's up to you to fund the government.

Well, Mitch McConnell or some other Republican whispers in his ear and says, hey, if we just punt this into February, she doesn't have that argument. Now you're having your wall fight with Nancy Pelosi. Isn't that better than having it with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell? And everyone thought that was what he had been sold on. Let's have the wall fight with Nancy

Pelosi. But Jonathan, isn't it still the case that as appealing as the optics of that fight might feel to some Republicans that Trump would still lose that fight because the House will be controlled by Democrats? Oh, yeah, absolutely. The reason he can't win the fight now is he still needs 60 votes in the Senate and the Democrats have 49 seats. Next year, they'll have 47 seats. He still can't win in the Senate. Now he doesn't even have the House. But the fact is, he believed the optics. He believed that a knockdown dragout fight with a divided government would look better for him than a knockdown dragout fight with a Republican House and a Republican Senate. So it looks better for the president, even though the chances of actually getting the wall are worse.

Are far slimmer. Yes. So McConnell has put forward this bill. It passes by a healthy margin. That was more than just a healthy margin. This was a voice vote. This meant they didn't even call a roll call to get people on record. They just said, how do people feel? Yeah, let's pass it. Anyone against? A little bit of grumbling, but let's just gavel it shut. We're done. There's no problem here. So then it was expected to go to the House, which was going to pass it, and then to the president's desk, and he was expected to sign it. So what exactly changed?

Am I reading it wrong, or is that a major, major mistake? No, that's clearly the state of play. In two words, Ann Coulter. The beginning and the end of the problem is Trump. He ran on building a wall. He's not building the wall again. Either the whole thing was BS throughout the campaign, and he was just lying to us to get himself elected, or he has no earthly idea how to get it done and no interest in finding out.

She said, no, no, we want $5 billion, no less, and we want a wall. And once he saw them make these demands, suddenly he got squishy, and he didn't like the ways out that congressional leaders were trying to offer him. It is becoming clearer and clearer that all we're getting is words, words, words. We're getting his sex-safe word. The wall, the wall, whenever he's in trouble, he just yells the wall. But there are, I think, increasingly fewer of his supporters who are believing it. I mean, remember, Ann Coulter is speaking for the people who voted for him on immigration more than anything else. And when

she calls him a gutless president presiding over a country without a wall. Ouch, that must have hurt. So this morning, the House Republican Conference, those are all the House Republicans, got together to have a meeting. Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, Paul Ryan, the outgoing Speaker of the House, they get up there, they say, we're putting this bill on the floor. You're going to vote for it. And, you know, all heck breaks loose. The conservatives start screaming about it. They say, there's no way we can do this. It's going to destroy us. It's going to destroy our base. And it's going to destroy Donald Trump because without his base, Trump will have nothing left. And in the middle of this scream fest going on behind closed doors,

there's this dramatic moment where Paul Ryan gets a phone call and says, I've got a phone call. It's from Trump. He storms out of the meeting to take this call from Trump. The next thing we hear, there's an emergency meeting

with the Republican leadership at the White House to meet about what to do about this wall funding. And I thought, okay, it might still work out. But then when I saw who was on the list at the meeting, I thought, we are dead. Who was on the list? Because it wasn't just the leadership. It also included Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows.

These were the hardline leaders of the House Freedom Caucus. And I just imagine them going into the White House and Paul Ryan saying, oh, Mr. President, you have to sign this. You can't shut down the government. And Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows saying the exact opposite, saying, Mr. President, you have to veto this bill. And the president gets to hear exactly the message he wants to hear, which is, you have the power to stop this.

So these are basically the Ann Coulters of the House suddenly in the White House with the president counseling him on what to do. Exactly. And those were voices that Ryan just couldn't overcome. Do a couple of statements and we're just going to go. So after this meeting, Paul Ryan sheepishly emerges from the White House. He steps to the microphones where the press is gathered and he says.

All right, let me just start off right now. We just had a very long productive meeting with the president. The president informed us that he will not sign the bill that came over from the Senate last evening because of his legitimate concerns for border security. The president isn't going to sign the bill that came over from the Senate last evening because of his legitimate concerns for border security. The president isn't going to sign this bill. And instead of pushing back on the president, Ryan does what Ryan does. He says that the president is rightfully concerned about the security of our nation's borders. So he kind of bolstered the president.

So what we're going to do is go back to the House and work with our members. We want to keep the government open, but we also want to see an agreement that protects the border. We have very serious concerns. Now, they do have a plan here, but the plan seems a little cockamamie. They're going to go back to the House and they're going to have a vote to bring the stopgap spending bill to the floor, then have a vote to add the stopgap spending bill to the floor, then have a vote to add the $5 billion in wall funding. I think what they're actually hoping to happen is that that vote to add the wall funding will fail. Then they can go back to the president and say, hey, we did our best.

We really tried to do what you wanted. We just don't have the votes. And that's where we stand. We're waiting for that vote. So pass a version of the bill that's palatable to the president, but that will fail so that when they go back to the president, they have no cards in their hands and he has to accept that this is over. That he is depleted. Now, the worst case scenario is actually that the House succeeds in passing a stopgap spending bill into February with the $5 billion in wall funding. Because if that happens, that bill has to go back to the Senate. All the senators are gone. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has already told the senators, if this bill passes, you guys have to get back on an airplane, come back to Washington and vote tomorrow. And once again, they don't have the 60 votes. It will go down and we will be exactly where we stand now, just hours away from a shutdown.

the scary thing is that if trump really is watching the end cultures of the world and wanting to satisfy them he might not blink and reopen the government quickly and the democrats have absolutely no incentive to do anything until the House turns Democratic in January. So if the government shuts down this weekend, much of the government could stay shut down until January 3rd, when the Democrats take over the House and promptly pass a bill to open the government and then put it back into Donald Trump's lap. And then what will he do? We have no idea. So, Jonathan, if there is, in fact, a government shutdown and it extends through the Christmas holiday, through New Year's,

all the way till the Democratic House takes over. How do those who advocated for this showdown, like the Ann Coulters and the Mark Meadows and the Jim Jordans, how do they see this benefiting the Republican Party in the long run? At some point, they're going to have to capitulate. But for now, they want to be able to say, we took it to the mat. We did everything we possibly could to try to get that $5 billion for this wall. We even shut down the government for that $5 billion. And ultimately, the dastardly Democrats took over the House, and what were we going to do?

I want to play kind of devil's advocate politically for just a moment because it feels like what the midterms showed us was that Republicans retained the Senate, which very much resembles the electoral college map of a presidential run, by deploying this strategy, by talking about immigration, by talking about the wall. So is what the president doing essentially activating kind of plan 2020 now?

I think that's true. I think that the president is trying to make sure that the rural states are staying in his camp. But remember, your account of what happened in the Senate is not all that clean because the Democratic senators who are up for reelection in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and in Ohio, and in Pennsylvania, four critical states for Trump, they all won reelection easily. So it's not at all clear that in the industrial Midwest, those states that Trump needs so badly, this is even playing that big.

So Ann Coulter in this moment could be representing a base voter that actually doesn't quite exist and that may not give the president his reelection. That's right. Ann Coulter certainly represents a wing of the Republican Party. Ann Coulter certainly represents a wing of the Republican Party. There's no question. But I'm not so sure that Ann Coulter speaks to as big a base as Donald Trump thinks she does. Okay, Jonathan, I'm going to ask you for your prediction. It is now 5.26 p.m. on Thursday. How do you predict that this year and all of this mishigas ends?

I am still predicting that in the end, Donald Trump will sign some kind of spending bill to punt us into next year so we can have this fight with Nancy Pelosi instead of Paul Ryan. Maybe there will be a short shutdown, but it won't be forever. So there's a possibility of a short shutdown, but you believe eventually he will sign some sort of temporary spending bill. That's right. He probably sees a real benefit in having another one of these fights in February

because that's just when the Democrats are going to be wanting to push their own agenda and their own investigative efforts against him. So, hey, at least this is a diversion from that. Well, as the politics editor in Washington, what does it mean to you to carry a fight like this into the new year? Not exactly a fresh start. What does that tell you looking ahead to 2019? I think that tells me that

we won't be getting a fresh break with a democratically controlled House. We're going to have a lot of lingering fights going on. And I think that the Democrats will be as frustrated about that as any Republican, because the fact is the Democrats have an agenda and they want to be focusing on that. They don't want to have to be responding to Donald Trump's provocations. And this will be a chance for Donald Trump to once again grab the microphone and start screaming about a wall. Jonathan, thank you very much. Cheers.

On Thursday night, the House passed a bill that would fund President Trump's border wall. That bill now heads to the Senate, where it is expected to be voted down. Look at this. The news just broke that Jim Mattis is leaving. Oh, my God. Oh. Yeah, he just tweeted it. General Jim Mattis will be retiring with distinction at the end of February after serving in my administration as Secretary of Defense.

Wow. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday afternoon, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, resigned in protest of the president's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. That withdrawal, based on Trump's claims

that ISIS has been defeated in Syria, has shocked U.S. allies and American military leaders, who dispute that the terror group has been beaten in Syria. The Times reports that Mattis pleaded with Trump to keep troops in Syria during a meeting at the White House earlier on Thursday, was rebuffed, and told the president he was resigning as a result.

In his resignation letter to the president, Mattis emphasized the need to respect allies and identify enemies, concluding that Trump deserves a Secretary of Defense whose views are, quote, better aligned with yours

on these and other issues. And... During his annual press conference in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria, saying American soldiers were no longer needed there. Putin's remarks seemed to fulfill the worry of U.S. military leaders, including Mattis, that Trump's decision would seed influence in Syria to U.S. adversaries, including Russia and Iran, to the detriment of U.S. interests. Produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Srees-Konaraja, Claire Tennesketter, Michael Simon-Johnson, Jessica Chung, Alexandra Lee Young, and Jonathan Wolfe. And edited by Paige Cowan, Larissa Anderson, and Wendy Doerr.

Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, and Stella Tan. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. Next week, our second annual Year in Sound. And we'll hear updates from some of our favorite stories of the year.

See you on Monday.