White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that President Donald Trump “doesn’t want” to shut down the government again, but she left open the possibility that he could shut it down over his demands for border wall funding. Sanders also implied Trump could declare a national emergency in order to build a wall.
In a press briefing Monday, CNN’s Jeff Zeleny asked Sanders whether Trump was “really willing to go through another shutdown if he can’t get any money out of the Democrats for the border wall?”
“The President doesn’t want to go through another shutdown,” Sanders responded. “That’s not the goal. The goal is border security and protecting the American people.”
“Ideally Democrats would take these next three weeks to negotiate in good faith as they’ve indicated that they would and come up with a deal that makes sense, that actually fixes the problem so we don’t have to go through that process,” she added.
Asked if Trump would be willing to take shutting down the government off of the table altogether, including by supporting legislation that would prevent shutdowns in the future, Sanders rejected the idea.
“I’m not going to get into the hypotheticals of taking that off the table,” Sanders said. “I haven’t seen a piece of legislation for us to even consider at this point that would make that a reality.”
Later in the briefing, Sanders said Trump could “take executive action” to build a wall.
“What I do know is if they don’t come back with a deal, that means Democrats get virtually nothing, that will make the President — and force him to have to take executive action that does not give the Democrats the things that they want,” she said.
Sanders: "The President doesn't want to go through another shutdown." pic.twitter.com/x0NiP1xBG1
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) January 28, 2019
