When things get stressful at work, the first thing to go is always the diet.
Despite urging from his doctor to shape up his diet, President Donald Trump broke out the cheeseburgers for a White House confab with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday afternoon, according to the New York Times.
In the Oval Office, munching on the burgers presumably prepared by the White House kitchen, the two men seemed at first to have come to an agreement on a temporary spending bill to continue funding the government.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Schumer’s chief of staff, Mike Lynch, also joined in on the lunch of cheeseburgers, which are said to be the president’s favorite meal and a frequent late-night snack.
In the meeting, the Democrat Schumer agreed to higher military spending and discussed the possibility of fully funding the president’s wall on the southern border with Mexico, sources told the Times. In exchange, the president agreed to support amnesty for immigrants who were brought into the US illegally as children.
Things broke down afterwords when the two sides disagreed on what length of temporary funding measure they’d agreed to support.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (center) is seen returning to the Capitol on Friday afternoon after a cheeseburger summit with Trump at the White House
Trump’s doctor has urged him to shape up his diet and exercise routine, but cheeseburgers are a notorious favorite of the president. He is seen here during the 2016 campaign
Trump wrote optimistically of the Oval Office cheeseburger meeting, but the two sides walked away with different ideas about the length of a funding measure – weeks versus days
The agreement reached at the cheeseburger summit was reportedly to pass a three or four-day temporary funding measure to allow negotiations on the deal to wrap up – at least, that’s what Schumer thought the agreement was.
Trump issued an optimistic tweet not long after the meeting with a different interpretation: ‘Excellent preliminary meeting in Oval…. Making progress – four week extension would be best!’
Trump also called Schumer on Friday afternoon and told him he thought that the agreement was a three or four-week spending bill, not three or four days, a person familiar with the call told the Times.
Schumer blasted back that Democrats saw a three-week measure as a stalling tactic and would oppose it, the source said.
As the clock wound down to the midnight deadline, Senate Republicans were unable to secure the 60 votes needed to defeat the Democrat filibuster on the spending bill, with four Republicans defecting and five Democrats joining the Republican’s razor-thin 51 seat majority.
‘In my heart, I thought we might have a deal tonight,’ Schumer said of the cheeseburger confab on the Senate floor, shortly after the government shut down
When the clock struck midnight with no deal and the shutdown began, both parties tried in earnest to heap blame upon the other side.
‘In my heart, I thought we might have a deal tonight,’ Schumer said of the cheeseburger confab on the Senate floor, shortly after the government shut down.
‘What happened to the President Trump who asked us to come up with a deal and promised to take the heat for it?’ Schumer said.
Trump blasted the Republicans on Twitter Friday and early Saturday, his planned weekend golf and fundraising trip to Mar-a-Lago placed on indefinite hold due to the shutdown.
‘Democrats are far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border,’ wrote Trump. ‘They could have easily made a deal but decided to play Shutdown politics instead.’