For someone with a supposedly exceptional knack for negotiation, the president has sure proven averse to compromise in a variety of situations, a set-up that at one point prompted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to quip that negotiating with the president is like negotiating with Jello.
The Jello is back; this time around, the president took to Twitter this Friday to indicate that when it comes time to renew funding for the government, he’s prepared to have it shut down if he doesn’t get the funding that he wants for “border security.” Such a threat to the very functioning of American government is what the president’s past insistence that Mexico would pay for a border wall between them and the United States has evolved into.
His comments were to that effect were immediately preceded by an attack on Democratic gun control advocates. Although he did not mention him by name, he targeted comments made recently by Democratic member of the U.S. House from California Eric Swalwell. The House lawmaker wants to enact a ban on assault weapons that doesn’t just cover future sales, instead going after assault weapons that are already out there as well.
Addressing these issues, the president commented as follows on Twitter Friday evening:
‘Democrats and liberals in Congress want to disarm law-abiding Americans at the same time they are releasing dangerous criminal aliens and savage gang members onto our streets. Politicians who put criminal aliens before American Citizens should be voted out of office! We are going to demand Congress secure the border in the upcoming CR. Illegal immigration must end!’
What the president is doing here is attempting to show hypocrisy on the part of the Democrats by casting their efforts to protect undocumented immigrants from being treated with bias by the justice system as leaving dangerous criminals roaming the streets. However, it’s not as though Democrats no longer support the legal system being used to prosecute actual crimes to the full extent possible; they just want undocumented immigrants to be treated the same as everyone else and thus keep undocumented immigrant communities from falling into fear of being singled out.
The president doesn’t seem to care, and there’s a concerning seeming foundation to that state of affairs, since it’s not as though he wants non-immigrant criminals to be deported. He’s seeming again here to wrongfully imply — as he did way back at the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign cycle — that undocumented immigrant communities are especially full of criminals.
He has taken his opposition to undocumented immigrant communities to the extreme of essentially calling for the government to be shut down in September if he can’t get the money he wants to fight them. Although he did not explicitly lay that part out on Twitter this Friday, he’s tacked that onto the sentiments he expressed in the past in contexts including that of his recent rally in Washington Township, Michigan.
Whether or not he will follow through on his promises to shut down the government in the face of a continuing lack of funds for his quixotic wall remains to be seen. He already threatened to veto a spending bill earlier this year over the issue before relenting and signing.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president below.
Featured Image via Alex Wong/ Getty Images
