As the US gets closer to a federal government shutdown, it is worth highlighting what Donald Trump was doing in the lead up.
Due to the filibuster in the Senate, he was going to need Democratic votes to get the 60 votes need to pass a bill to keep the government funded. Despite that, on September 15 he called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a name in a post on Truth Social:
Congressional Republicans, including Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson, are working on a short term “CLEAN” extension of Government Funding to stop Cryin’ Chuck Schumer from shutting down the Government.
He did it again three days later:
TOMORROW, House Republicans are taking a very important Vote to pass a CLEAN TEMPORARY FUNDING BILL. The Leader of the Democrats, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, wants to shut the Government down.
Why do that? A simple explanation is that he thought he only needed Republican votes to pass the bill. On September 3, when asked if a shutdown could be avoided, he told the press in the Oval Office that, “Yeah, I do. I think the Republicans will vote for an extension. We won’t have any Democrat votes.” He then proceeded to rant about Democrats for five minutes.
A similar thing happened when he appeared on Fox and Friends on September 12. When asked about avoiding a shutdown, he said, “we have to get Republican votes.” When one of the hosts referenced the filibuster by saying, “You have to get 60, don’t you?” Donald Trump responded, “No, we we we’re going to do a probably continuing resolution or we’re going do something.”
The day after his second post calling Chuck Schumer “cryin,” he read off prepared remarks and stated, “But in the Senate, we have 53 republicans total and we need 60 votes. That means we need Democrat votes.” So with less than two weeks to go, he finally presented as if he understood he needed Democratic votes.
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