BORDER/POLITICAL FIGURES/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/WALL: “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 [1-22-18] 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.’…
But providing border wall money could also push away more liberal Democrats, who prefer to completely restart negotiations rather than start from any existing bill, even a bipartisan one like the proposal written by Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).”
-Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim, “Schumer withdraws offer on Trump’s wall,” Politico, Jan. 23, 2018 01:34pm