WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump shrugged at the growing possibility that the government will shut down next week, insisting Democrats would bear the blame for thousands of federal employees being off the job even as he refuses to meet top Democratic lawmakers in Congress.
“They want to have transgender for everybody,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday, referring to Democratic support for transgender rights. “These people are crazy ― the Democrats. So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down. But they’re the ones that are shutting down the government.”
Earlier this week, Trump bailed on a previously scheduled meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), calling their demands for health care policies “ridiculous.” He declared that no meeting could possibly be productive, deepening the standoff ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government.
On Friday, Trump left Washington to attend a golf tournament in New York.
At the Capitol, Jeffries held a press conference to blast Republicans for suggesting they would cancel votes next week when the House is supposed to return from recess.
“House Republicans, on vacation, cancelled votes on the eve of a government shutdown, and Donald Trump is at a golf event,” Jeffies said. “He didn’t have the time to meet with Democratic leaders to fund the government and address the Republican health care crisis.”
The House has already passed a short-term government funding measure, however, that would avert a shutdown if the Senate approves it. It’s possible some Democrats will support the measure when it comes up for another vote next week.
Democrats have leverage over the budget process, since 60 votes are required to pass a bill in the Senate and Republicans can’t act alone. They are pushing for an extension of expanded tax credits for people who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, which are due to expire at the end of this year. They also want to roll back $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid that Republicans passed in Trump’s signature domestic policy achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Republicans have called those demands unreasonable. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Democrats ought to “dial back” their asks on Friday.
“I’m a big believer that there’s always a way out,” Thune told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday. “And I think there are off-ramps here, but I don’t think that the negotiating position, at least at the moment, that the Democrats are trying to exert here is going to get you there.”
Thune also told the AP he thinks Trump could be open to a negotiation on the expanded health care subsidies in the future if Democrats weren’t threatening a shutdown. Several Republican senators have expressed a desire to reach a bipartisan solution on the matter. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), for example, proposed a two-year extension of the credits with certain restrictions on who could apply.
But Democrats would likely need something more substantive than a suggestion of a possible future negotiation over the ACA tax credits.
“Just simply promises for something that maybe will happen with Donald Trump, my guess is Senator Schumer will say, ‘I need something more specific here,’” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told HuffPost on a press call on Friday.
Klobuchar also said Democrats are willing to negotiate on their demands — but that Republicans need to first agree to sit down with them.
“We never said that we had to have every single thing, and every single thing is a red line,” the senator said. “We want to negotiate with them to make this health care crisis less bad. One way we can do it that’s obvious is these ACA tax credits. But there’s many other things that we could be doing, too, and they’re well aware of it.”
Part of the problem is that the Trump administration did not honor the previous spending agreement. Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, who has instructed federal agencies to carry out permanent layoffs if the government shuts down next week, oversaw a rare and legally dubious “pocket rescission” maneuver to cancel billions in congressionally approved spending last month.
“They are completely dedicated to breaking the spending deal that they’re coming to. And that’s what’s so unique about this shutdown,” Bobby Kogan, a budget expert with the liberal Center for American Progress, told HuffPost.
As for the layoff threat, Jeffries said the administration has been illegally firing workers all year.
“The fact that they are threatening to do more of that simply relates to what they were already going to do and intending to do, and they want to use the smoke screen of a government shutdown, caused by them, to do more damage,” he said.