POTUS Donald Trump’s signature issue during the 2016 presidential campaign, building a “big, beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border to substantially curb both illegal immigration and drug smuggling, came one step closer to reality recently even as Democrats continued to put up new roadblocks to funding.

A few months back, the president held a public discussion with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, in which both sides alternately praised legislation involving prison reform and the 2019 farm funding bill while trading barbs over wall funding.

As Fox News reported: 

President Trump clashed Tuesday with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi with the cameras rolling in the Oval Office, as the president insisted he’s willing to let the government shut down if Congress doesn’t approve funding for his U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The exchange quickly escalated into tense moments following POTUS Trump’s opening statement.

Early in the meeting POTUS claimed that without real, tangible “border security, we’ll shut down the government.” Over the course of the next several minutes, Pelosi and Schumer both offered commentary and made claims, including one by the Democratic House leader that Republicans currently dominate both legislative chambers and thus ought to be able to pass a bill funding whatever the president wants.

POTUS countered by noting — correctly — that the GOP could not get enough Democrats in the Senate to go along with anything having to do with the border wall; without Democrat support, he noted, the White House couldn’t get the 60 votes needed for a filibuster-proof majority.

The Democrat Senate leader, meanwhile, offered continuing budget resolutions — temporary stopgap funding mechanisms rather than a full-on budget — as an alternative to shutting down the government, claiming both could pass the chambers immediately. But the president rejected those as well, noting — correctly — that as long as Democrats are in charge of the House, where all spending bills must originate according to the Constitution, they won’t include any border wall funding whatsoever in spending bills.

Following the meeting, Schumer accused the president of throwing a “temper tantrum” while vowing it “will not get him his wall.”

POTUS perhaps should have responded, “Wanna bet?”

Border security is national security

In recent days the president shocked the U.S. defense establishment when he called the Defense Department’s 2020 budget request “crazy.” It was shocking because up to that point POTUS had been all-in regarding spending increases for the military he (and the Pentagon) believed were long overdue. 

Since then, however, he’s reversed course. Most likely sensing that he wasn’t going to make any substantial progress with Schumer and Pelosi regarding border wall funding, this week the president instructed Defense Secretary James Mattis to submit a $750 billion budget request (up from $700 billion in FY 2018 and $716 billion in FY 2019). 

Why the course correction? So he can use money from the defense budget to build the wall. And in fact, POTUS has said so, as The National Sentinel reported Tuesday.

“If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country,” Trump wrote on Twitter, “the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall.”

Because border security is a national security issue. 

….People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built. If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2018

At one point, Schumer quipped that during the campaign, candidate Trump said Mexico would pay for the wall.

And Mexico will, once the newly-renegotiated trade agreement replacing NAFTA is passed. But that’s another story for another day.

POTUS Trump has learned how Washington works, and now he’s three steps ahead of Democrats.

Read more about how the Left really wants open borders at OpenBorders.news.

Sources include:

FoxNews.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

Politico.com