Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told a bunch of reporters Friday afternoon after a White House meeting that President Donald Trump is willing to keep (some of) the government shut down for “years” if Democrats in the Senate don’t agree to provide funding for his partial border wall/steel slat thing:

Chuck Schumer says President Trump told him he’s prepared to keep the government shut down for months or even years. — Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 4, 2019

Incredible! POTUS confirmed Schumer’s account at a subsequent and characteristically honesty-free/insane Rose Garden press conference. Here he is, for example, making an illuminating point about how apparently there aren’t “Welcome to America” signs along the entire 1,850-mile U.S.–Mexico border:

You don’t even have a sign saying Mexico/U.S. There’s no sign designating that you have just entered the U.S. There’s just open space. And I explained that at the meeting today with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and a lot of other people at the meeting.

Pelosi and Schumer and the other high-level government officials at the meeting no doubt enjoyed “learning” this surprising fact.

Also … what is this segue? What?

[Border crossers] can apply for asylum. They can, most importantly, they can apply for citizenship. Because the companies I told you that created these great job numbers, they’re incredible job numbers, beyond anybody’s expectations. I don’t think there was one Wall Street genius, of which I know many of them, but they’re not geniuses. There’s not one that predicted anywhere close to these job numbers.

What???? Epic. Also, you can definitely, definitely not apply for citizenship right after crossing the border; you have to already be a legal permanent resident of the U.S.

In any case, despite a few Republican senators having publicly speculated about the possibility of making some sort of deal to end the shutdown, it seems like the Republican caucus is still standing behind Trump’s position that it’s the border wall or nothing. (It will take 60 votes to pass a bill through the Senate ending the shutdown; there are only 47 Democrats in the chamber, and in any case, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have to bring the bill up for a vote in the first place.)