Trump talked out of shoving government into a shutdown Administration officials and congressional leaders scrambled after Trump threatened to veto a massive spending package.

For a few hours Friday, Washington peered over the brink.

President Donald Trump had stunned even his closest advisers earlier in the day by tweeting that he was “considering a VETO“ of a $1.3 trillion spending package.


And only after a hard press from administration officials and congressional leaders did Trump grudgingly sign the bill “as a matter of national security.“

"There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill," he said at a news conference. "There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill."

Trump said he swallowed his objections because of its funding boost for national defense and the military.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly were key in convincing Trump not to veto the legislation, according to a source familiar with conversations between congressional leaders and the president.

Speaker Paul Ryan also put in a call to Trump from Wisconsin. He had already flown home for the recess and dialed him up to remind him of the GOP wins in the omnibus and encouraged him to sign the bill.

A source familiar with the conversation said both Ryan and Trump felt better after the talk, suggesting Ryan knew the president was starting to understand the importance of averting a shutdown.

Still, Trump was visibly frustrated Friday and vowed he would not be put in the same position again.

"I will never sign another bill like this again," he said, calling it a "ridiculous situation."

Trump’s earlier veto threat — citing the spending bill’s lack of full funding for his border wall and attention to undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers — came as many lawmakers who would have to override his rejection or pass a stopgap funding measure were already on their way out of Washington for a two-week recess.

Government funding lapsed at midnight Friday, which would have marked the third shutdown of the year. Despite Trump's frustration, both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill had joined White House aides on Thursday in touting gains for both parties in the spending deal, which the Senate approved on a 65-32 vote after midnight on Friday morning.

The president’s top aides had said Thursday he would sign the bill, but his threat was a reminder that only Trump truly knows what the White House is doing at any time.

Trump’s veto-threat tweet caught many in the West Wing and on Capitol Hill by surprise, sending them scrambling to determine how serious he was. Illustrating the degree to which Trump had upended his own staff once again, one West Wing official said on Friday morning that the likelihood of a shutdown was “extremely high.”

Before Trump’s afternoon announcement, there was hope in the White House that the defense community, including Mattis — who was slated to meet with Trump on Friday — could convince him that whatever stopgap spending agreement resulted from a shutdown threat would not deliver the high level of defense spending provided by the bill he threatened to nix. Sources said White House legislative affairs liaison Marc Short went to speak to the president to try to convince him of the merits of the deal.

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“This is just crazy,” one White House official said.

But Trump’s frustration was severe, the West Wing official said. The president had been concerned by conservative outcry on Fox News about the limited amount provided for the border wall and interior enforcement and the way in which Amtrak funding was being framed as a victory for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had acknowledged late Thursday that “begging, pleading and cajoling” were required in order to assuage his members’ concerns with the spending bill, which keeps the government funded through September.

“I must say, after a long and intense day of successful discussions, I’m relieved rather than depressed we might be able to actually finish tonight,” McConnell said Thursday night.

Trump’s tweet, even though didn’t go through with it, punctured the relief among congressional GOP leaders who thought they had earlier secured Trump’s support.

"I've had lunches and dinners with all the congressional leadership,” another White House official said. “They just can't deal with him anymore. They're done."

Trump “obviously turned on Fox News this morning, saw people criticizing the deal, and got mad,” the official added.

Since lawmakers had already left town, including some on overseas trips, GOP lawmakers and aides were left burning up the phone lines of their leadership and West Wing contacts to try to determine what exactly was going on.

"I don’t know if anyone has figured out if he’s serious or if he’s just blowing steam and needs Paul Ryan to talk him off the cliff,” said one senior Republican aide swarmed with calls from worried lawmakers just after the Trump tweet.

Democrats argued that they stood to gain if Trump’s fit of pique prompted a veto that sent their GOP counterparts back to the negotiating table.

“One of two things will happen,” a senior Democratic aide said. “He either signs the bill by the end of the day, or he ends up signing a bill he likes even less after Republicans have to renegotiate with Dems to get out of a shutdown.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Appropriations Committee's top Democrat, told the president that "you terminated protections for" the undocumented immigrants Trump says he is concerned with helping, "you cynically held them hostage for your costly boondoggle of a wall, and you have undercut every bipartisan attempt to fix the mess you created."

"You can fix this," Leahy said in a statement. "Or at the very least, don’t unilaterally make things worse, yet again."

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) tweeted his own message to Trump, noting that even though Democrats "obstructed [the] normal appropriations process," the spending deal has "important" upsides.

Trump’s complaint about the bill’s lack of a broad deal on the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals came after White House aides tried last weekend to get Trump’s $25 billion in wall money in exchange for temporary DACA protections, according to aides.

Democrats balked, demanding a pathway to citizenship, and congressional negotiators traded smaller piecemeal offers early this week, to no avail. Republicans said the two parties were never close to an agreement.

“I really tried to keep the DACA separate from the spending bill,” said Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma in an interview Thursday. “We can’t have a situation where we deal with immigration policy when we get the text of the omnibus [Wednesday] at 8:30. I don’t want to deal with immigration policy that way.”

According to one legislative source, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and conservative lawmakers had been trying to persuade Trump to reject the spending deal. Miller told GOP leaders earlier this week that they needed to fight harder to fund Trump’s border wall, because it could be their last shot if Democrats take over the House in November.

Trump’s Schumer-related frustrations stem from the president’s long-running resistance to the multibillion-dollar Gateway infrastructure project in their shared home state of New York. The president had previously threatened to veto the spending bill if Gateway funding — a top priority of the Senate minority leader — was included. The final agreement allows the project to compete for money from Amtrak.

Fiscal conservatives in Congress who had opposed the spending package urged Trump to follow through with the veto threat, concerned the bill’s high price tag would further bloat the debt.

“Please do, Mr. President. I am just down the street and will bring you a pen. The spending levels without any offsets are grotesque, throwing all of our children under the bus. Totally irresponsible,” tweeted Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee.

Trump's frustrations with the bill were well-known in the White House, but West Wing aides and members of Congress believed they had persuaded the president to go along with the measure.

His tweet completely upended the White House’s messaging on the bill. On Thursday, the White House had declared the bill “a win for the American people.”

Vice President Mike Pence touted the bill at length at an event in New Hampshire, saying “it’s filled with one example after another that proves that when it comes to President Donald Trump, it's promises made and promises kept.”

"Let's cut right to the chase. Is the president going to sign the bill? Yes. Why? Because it funds his priorities," White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters on Thursday.

Andrew Restuccia, Ben White, Heather Caygle and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.