Playing chicken with Trump’s Wall may not be the best strategy

Senate Minority Leader Schumer managed to single-handedly tick off the entire Democrat, progressive, and liberal political world with his inability to bring home any bacon from the shutdown fiasco.

Rather than agreeing to a deal Friday, before the federal government funding ran out, Schumer insisted on dragging out negotiations until Monday, only to concede. As if that weren’t bad enough, the agreed upon deal gave even more tax cuts to Republicans.

With his base up in arms, Schumer withdrew a handsome funding package for Trump’s long-promised southern border wall. Or so claim the Democrats.

Dick Durban, the second-highest ranking Democrat says Schumer called the White House to tell them no deal, but the White House says the deal never existed.

Politico reported:

Chuck Schumer is taking his big spending boost for Donald Trump’s border wall off the table. The Senate minority leader, through an aide, informed the White House on Monday that he was retracting the offer he made last week to give Trump well north of the $1.6 billion in wall funding Trump had asked for this year, according to two Democrats. And now they say Trump will simply not get a better deal than that on his signature campaign promise. Schumer “took it off,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “He called the White House yesterday and said it’s over.” In the now-famous cheeseburger summit last Friday with Trump, Schumer offered a large increase in border wall spending as a condition for a broader deal to help Dreamers. But after that offer was rebuffed — prompting the three-day government shutdown — the president has now “missed an opportunity to get the wall,” one Democratic aide said. Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said Tuesday that the Schumer offer “never existed.” “You can’t rescind money you never really offered in the first place,” he said on Fox News.

Enter Republican Senator Tom Cotton (still Politico):

“They claim that some crazy deal was made,” Cotton said of Democrats. “And then when we say no deal was made, they accuse Republicans and the president of reneging.”

Given how poorly Schumer handled the shutdown, it seems plausible any pronouncements sternly removing bargaining chips off the table is purely political posturing and an attempt to save face.



