BORDER/DEMS/ELECTION/GOVERNMENT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/WALL: “President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday [1-16-19] that he could turn the ongoing government shutdown into a political issue in next year’s presidential election, labeling ‘Radical Democrats’ as a ‘party of open borders and crime.’ Trump’s White House is in the midst of stalled efforts to reopen portions of the federal government that shuttered late last year after the president refused to sign legislation to fund them. But even as the government remained mired in the longest shutdown in the nation’s history, the president signaled that he will look to make political hay out of Democrats’ unwillingness to meet his demands for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border…The president has long insisted that a border wall, his signature campaign promise from 2016, is the only solution to what his administration has labeled as the crisis of drugs and migrants flowing across the nation’s southern border. Democrats, led by newly installed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have refused to appropriate any money for the president’s border wall, insisting instead that any border funding be directed toward other security priorities.”
–Caitlin Oprysko, “Trump signals he’ll make shutdown a 2020 issue,” Politico, January 16, 2019 8:59 am