President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, on Tuesday wholeheartedly embraced his father’s threat to declare a national emergency if Democrats don’t agree to fund his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.
“I want him to declare an emergency,” Eric Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his show Tuesday night.
Hannity, one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders in the media, agreed. “Oh, I think he will,” he said.
After a 35-day partial government shutdown, President Trump on Friday agreed to a stopgap spending bill to reopen the government for three weeks while Congress negotiates funding for border security. Democrats have steadfastly refused to carve out $5.7 billion in a spending bill to fund his border wall, which he has vowed for years Mexico would pay to build.
If his border wall demands aren’t met in the spending bill Congress is negotiating, Trump has threatened to not sign it, thus leading to another partial government shutdown on Feb. 15. He has also warned he might declare a national emergency to secure the funding. In declaring an emergency, the president has said he would use his executive power to redirect military construction funds to build the wall.
Eric Trump, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, on Tuesday claimed Americans want his father to go through with declaring a national emergency if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) don’t “negotiate something that’s fair.”
“Honestly, if they don’t, declare the emergency and build the wall with the United States military because that’s what people in this country want,” Eric Trump told Hannity. “And then redouble your efforts on legal immigration, get great people in this country because that’s what America wants and that’s what America needs.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed major concerns over the president potentially declaring a national emergency over his wall.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday called the move “a terrible idea.”
“I hope he doesn’t do it,” Rubio told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s just not a good precedent to set in terms of action. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want border security ― I do. I just think that’s the wrong way to achieve it.”
Watch the full exchange below: