President Donald Trump made the resist movement his punching bag on Thursday evening as he addressed Republican Party officials at their winter meeting in Washington.
All Democrats do is ‘obstruct’ and ‘resist,’ Trump said of the minority.
‘I don’t know if they’re good at it. They can’t be too good at it, because we’re passing a lot of things,’ he said to laughter from the friendly audience, ‘so I wouldn’t say their resistance is extremely successful.’
Jabbing the other side for its opposition to his immigration reform platform in the opening moments of his speech, Trump said, ‘You know the Democrats are AWOL. They’re missing in action. We’re saying, where are they? We have a proposal, we never hear from them.’
President Donald Trump made the resist movement his punching bag on Thursday evening as he addressed Republican Party officials at their winter meeting in Washington
Earlier on Thursday, at another Republican Party function, Trump gave Democrats an ultimatum when it comes to making reforms to the immigration system.
The president who is now in his second year in office said the other party could accept his immigration compromise or they’ll get ‘nothing at all.’
Speaking at the GOP’s annual retreat in West Virginia, Trump said Democrats might as well ‘come on board’ with his plan to build a border wall and give 1.8 million illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children a pathway to citizenship because ‘we are not going to improve it.’
‘We have to get help from the other side, or we have to elect many more Republicans. That’s another way of doing it, really that’s another way of doing it,’ Trump said. ‘They talk a good game with DACA but they don’t produce.’
The president also said that it was a ‘trap’ to refer to the illegal immigrant youth he’s offering to protect as ‘Dreamers’ in another slap at Democrats.
‘It’s not Dreamers. Don’t fall into that trap,’ he stated. ‘It’s much different than Dreamers.’
Democrats were low-hanging fruit for Trump on Thursday as traveled to West Virginia for lunchtime remarks to lawmakers, then flew back to Washington for the evening address to Republican National Committee members.
Trump also took slaps at another favorite target, the media, at the RNC gathering, where he bashed the networks just before the White House had journalists escorted out.
‘Did anybody not see the State of the Union, because even the haters back there gave us good reviews on that one,’ Trump said, referring to reporters covering the event from the back of the room. ‘They came up with fake polls, you know they had fake polls, but even fake polls were good.’
President Donald Trump told Democrats Thursday that they can accept his immigration compromise or they’ll get ‘nothing at all’
As President Trump prepared to address Republicans’ annual retreat on Thursday, he hammered Democrats in the fight over the status of the illegal immigrant youth on Twitter.
‘March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Democrats are doing nothing about DACA,’ Trump said. ‘They Resist, Blame, Complain and Obstruct – and do nothing.’
Trump urged his massive following to ‘start pushing Nancy Pelosi and the Dems to work out a DACA fix, NOW!’
In another message Trump said he was heading to ‘beautiful’ West Virginia, where he would be meeting with the ‘great members of the Republican Party.’
‘Will be planning Infrastructure and discussing Immigration and DACA, not easy when we have no support from the Democrats,’ Trump said, articulating his plans for the retreat, taking place at luxury resort The Greenbrier.
The president told the party faithful ‘one of the strengths’ of the GOP is that ‘we’re a big tent with lots of diverse views.’
‘We want an immigration policy that’s fair, equitable but that’s gonna protect our people,’ he said. ‘We want people coming into our country based on merit and based on the fact that they are going to love our country and they respect our people and our country.’
Mimicking a lotto worker Trump said, ‘We don’t want visa lottery, pick a lottery ticket, pick a lottery – we don’t want that. So, we want it based on merit.’
President Trump pressured Democrats to work out a deal on DACA in a Thursday morning tweet
He also said that he would be talking DACA at the Republican retreat in West Virginia Thursday as Trump addresses a lunchtime session
Last week, the White House rolled out a four-pillar framework for an immigration deal.
Trump said he would grant a pathway to citizenship to 1.8 million illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in their youth – which the president says was ‘generous’ because it would go beyond the people who were eligible for DACA – in return for the $25 billion he requested for his border wall and for border security.
The White House also wants chain migration contained to just the nuclear families of green card holders and wants to end the visa lottery program.
‘Either they’re going to have to come on board, because they talk a good game with DACA but they don’t produce,’ Trump told Republican lawmakers on Thursday, ‘or we’re just going to have to really work to get more people, in a much easier fashion legislation.’
In early September, President Trump’s Justice Department announced the phasing out of the DACA program, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era ordered that allowed the so-called ‘Dreamers.
DACA permits begin expiring on March 5, the date that Trump kicked the can down the road to Congress to figure out a fix.
The plight of the ‘Dreamers’ has been central to drama on Capitol Hill.
On Tuesday evening Trump stirred the pot in his State of the Union speech when he said, ‘Americans are dreamers, too.’
Touching on the remarks today he said, ‘We have dreamers in this country, too. We can’t forget our dreamers. I have a lot of dreamers here.’
The ‘Dreamers’ reference was one of the most talked about from Trump’s Tuesday night State of the Union address.
‘I am extending an open hand to work with the members of both parties – Democrats and Republicans – to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion and creed,’ he said Tuesday, with ‘citizen’ being the vital word.
The ‘dreamers’ line drew praise from white nationalist leader David Duke, many Democrats, on the other hand, had brought ‘dreamers’ as their guests.
Last month, the president rejected a bipartisan proposal from a group of centrist senators, which led to a three-day government shutdown.
He and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also had a back-and-forth over DACA and the president’s proposed border wall, but when negotiations broke down the White House quickly dubbed the government’s closure the ‘Schumer shutdown.’
Next week there’s yet another government funding deadline on Friday, Feb. 8, which means the government could shut down again.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows said Thursday while speaking to reporters at the Republican retreat that he did not anticipate another lapse in federal funding.
The leader of the House conservatives did add a caveat: ‘I didn’t anticipate one last time.’
‘I think the president has probably been out there leading on immigration more so than most presidents,’ he added, preparing to hear from Trump at the retreat later Thursday. ‘I mean, he set four pillars, he’s, you know, outlined what he would like to see, it’s now incumbent upon Congress to work.’
‘I mean the fact that we do not have a plan, here on February 1, five months into a six-month timeline is troubling,’ Meadows said.
Speaker to reporters first thing in the morning on Thursday, Sen. John Thune, head of the Republican Conference in the Senate, suggested that the four-pillared White House plan may have to be shaved down to two: DACA and the border wall.
A two-prong solution, ‘may be the best we can hope for,’ Thune said.
But proving just how far lawmakers are away from a deal, even within their own party, Meadows immediately dismissed the South Dakota senator’s position.
‘To suggest that we’re going to give, in my mind, a clean DACA for a few billion dollars, that will not really secure our border is a non-starter,’ Meadows said.
Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a co-author of legislation that Trump has endorsed that would reorient the immigration system around skills-based labor, said Thursday afternoon that he would ‘absolutely’ support a bill based off the president’s demands that combined illegal and legal immigration measures.
‘I absolutely support that framework and would be proud to vote for that framework and I’m one of the more conservative members of the Senate,’ Perdue pledged, saying it was his sense that lawmakers were coming around to Trump’s position.
Standing beside him House Budget Chairman Steve Womack pointed that no such legislation currently exists, however.
‘Look, I don’t vote on frameworks, I vote on legislation as it’s presented,’ he stated.