Sarah Sanders said president wants to avoid government shutdown can find other ways to pay for proposed wall

Donald Trump may back down on his demand for $5bn for a wall on the border with Mexico to avoid a government shutdown, the White House has unexpectedly signaled.

The president had been insisting that Congress include the money in spending bills that must be passed and signed into law by Friday night in order to keep the federal government up and running.

But the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said on Tuesday that Trump wants to avoid a shutdown and can find other ways to pay for his proposed wall.

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“We have other ways that we can get to that $5bn,” Sanders said in an appearance on Fox News. “At the end of the day, we don’t want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration, from drugs coming into this country.”

The wall has been a point of contention between Trump and congressional Democrats since the president’s 2016 campaign vow to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Instead, he has sought money from the federal budget.

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At a White House meeting last week with House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Trump declared he would be “proud” to shut down the government. “I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” he said. “I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”

But congressional Republicans, unsure of the path forward, have encouraged him to back down from the fight, seeing no way he could win it.

Sanders said Trump would now be prepared to support alternate border security legislation, “as long as we can couple that with other funding resources that would help us get to the $5bn”.

She said the White House “absolutely” believes it could legally use defense funding to pay for the wall, a proposition likely to meet legal challenge if tried.

“Let’s get the government funded and let everybody have a very good Christmas and go home with something to celebrate,” she told Fox News. “There’s certainly a number of different funding sources that we’ve identified that we can couple with the money that would be given through congressional appropriations that would help us get to that $5bn that the president needs in order to protect our borders.”