With just over 24 hours before the government is set to shutdown, Donald Trump and congressional leaders from both parties emerged from a high-stakes White House meeting on Monday with no agreement, setting the stage for large swaths of the federal government to close after midnight Wednesday.
The impasse came after closed-door talks between the four top congressional leaders and Trump in the Oval Office, where lawmakers appeared to trade blame but make little progress towards a deal. “There are still large differences between us,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters after the meeting, claiming that Republicans refused to engage on their core demands around health care and restoring previous funding cuts.
“Their bill has not one iota of Democratic input,” he added, taking aim at a House-passed seven-week stopgap funding bill that Senate Democrats rejected last week. “That is never how we’ve done this before.”
When Republicans obstructed under Obama, it looked like a Republican shutdown because Obama intended to reach bipartisan compromise, they just didn’t want him to accomplish anything of value.
This looks like a Republican shutdown because Trump announced at the beginning that they would NOT negotiate with Democrats at all and they should just vote for the Republican bill “just because”.
This is the only time the Democrats have had leverage during the second Trump administration, so Trump needed to find some concessions to get their votes, and instead announced that he would give none. That’s why this is the Trump shutdown.