With a government shutdown looming, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that President Trump will look for alternative funding for his border wall rather than insisting it be included by Congress in the next budget.
The retreat comes just days before vast swaths of the federal government would be forced to close unless reach a deal is reached on remaining portions of the budget.
Trump had demanded that lawmakers include $5 billion for the wall that he once promised Mexico would cover.
The deadline to reach a budget deal is midnight Friday.
“We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion. At the end of the day, we don’t want to shut down the government, we want to shut down the border,” Sanders told Fox News.
“There are certainly a number of different funding sources that we’ve identified that we can use, that we can couple with money that would be given through congressional appropriations that would help us get to that $5 billion that the president needs in order to protect our border,” she added.
It’s a major reversal from last week, when Trump said he would be “proud” to shut down the government in an astonishing exchange with top congressional Democrats.
“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you. I’m going to shut it down for border security,” Trump told Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the top House Democrat, last Tuesday.
As recently as Sunday, top White House advisers were publicly insisting that Trump would not agree to a budget deal unless it included funding for the wall.
“If it comes to it, absolutely. This is a very fundamental issue,” senior Trump aide Stephen Miller said on CBS’s “Face The Nation” of the president’s willingness to shut down the government. “At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country,” he later claimed.
Democrats taunted Trump for the about-face.
“THEN: Who is going to pay for the wall? Mexico. Mexico. Mexico,” Schumer tweeted. “NOW: Who is going to pay for the wall? American taxpayers. And if I don’t get $5 billion from them, I’m going to shut down the government.”
He added: “President [Trump], no temper tantrum is going to get you the wall.”
Trump has repeatedly — and wrongly — claimed that construction of the wall is underway, the United States has some of the world’s weakest immigration laws and that the wall will slow the flow of illegal drugs into the country.
While Trump has openly sparred with Democrats over the wall, both the House and Senate are still controlled by Republicans who do not have the votes to include money for the wall in the budget bills.
