POLITICS/NATIONAL DEBT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump issued an extraordinary challenge to his own party late Tuesday [8-22-17], threatening to shut down the government in a matter of weeks if Congress did not fund a wall on the southern border that was a signature promise of his campaign for the White House.
Mr. Trump followed up on that threat on Wednesday by going after a key Republican senator on Twitter who has been skeptical of building a border wall between the United States and Mexico. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is also one of two Republican senators up for re-election next year in a swing state, and the president has put his finger on the scale toward a primary challenger, Kelli Ward.
On Tuesday night, he told a rowdy crowd in Phoenix, ‘If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.’
‘We’re going to have our wall,’ he added. ‘The American people voted for immigration control. We’re going to get that wall.’
Tuesday’s admonition sharpened a suggestion that Mr. Trump made early this year, in the wake of a budget agreement he grudgingly accepted even though it omitted money for the wall, that the United States needed ‘a good ‘shutdown’ this fall to force a partisan confrontation over federal spending.”
-Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump to Congress: Fund the Wall or I’ll Shut the Government,” The New York Times online, Aug. 23, 2017