Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 27, 2018 / 12:44 PM GMT
By Allan Smith
Just days after claiming that “many” furloughed government workers told him they’re fine with not getting paid so long as he secures additional funding for a border wall, President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning that “most of the people not getting paid are Democrats.”
Trump, who offered no support for his claim, fired off the tweet early Thursday morning as the government shutdown entered its sixth day. Trump said on Christmas Day he will not reopen the government until he gets $5 billion in funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats have said they won’t provide Trump with that funding, and indicated they won’t go beyond the $1.6 billion that has already been allocated for border wall purposes. Republicans and Democrats reached an agreement last week on a stopgap spending measure to prevent a shutdown — a deal that the White House signaled Trump would sign. But at the 11th hour, Trump scuttled the agreement because it did not provide additional funding for a border wall.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said the U.S. must have “a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it,” before claiming that “many” furloughed workers want him to keep the government closed until he locks in wall funding.
“Many of those workers have said to me, communicated, ‘stay out until you get the funding for the wall,'” he said.
