Someone must have taken the old president’s brain out and replaced it with a pot roast because in a magical switch that can only be explained by science and a full-on lobotomy, the president has promised 25 lawmakers that if they can bring him a bill that will extend protections to 800,000 immigrants’ children, he will sign it.
“You folks are going to have to come up with a solution. And if you do, I will sign that solution,” Donald Trump told members of Congress, in what USA Today noted was a freewheeling negotiation at the White House with reporters in the room.
But because some of the old president’s DNA remains, Trump still insisted that funding for his dumbass border wall that no one wants, except those who live in Mud Spit, Va., and those who love overalls in a nonironic or fashion way, remains apart of the deal.
Before Trump’s about-face, he’d sounded like he wanted nothing to do with the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that temporarily protected immigrants who were brought to the United States as children without documentation.
“A clean DACA bill to me is to take care of the 800,000 people,” Trump said, USA Today reports. “We take care of that, and we also take care of security. And then we can go to comprehensive [immigration reform] later on.”
Although Trump campaigned on claims that Mexico was going to pay for a border wall—one that Mexico was never going to pay for—it appears that Trump has found a convenient ally in DACA talks, which have reportedly held up many of Trump’s immigration priorities, including his dumbass wall.
USA Today notes that Congress will be hard-pressed to make this work because the federal government could face a shutdown if a spending bill is not passed by Jan. 19.
Democrats said that while Trump appears to be all in on finding a solution to protections for those who were brought to the U.S. as children without documentation, the growing list of demands from the White House is becoming nearly impossible to accommodate.
“It is part of a pattern of behavior on the part of this White House during sensitive bipartisan negotiations,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, told USA Today. “To throw down a list from the hard-line wing of the White House at the last minute is not a very fortuitous or smart thing to do.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that Republican were not seeking impossible mandates in their requests, but simply seeking a long-term solution to immigration issues.
“We want to have a DACA compromise. We want to make sure the DACA problem is solved,” Ryan told reporters, USA Today reports. But, he added, “we want to make sure that we have the right kind of interior and border enforcement so that we don’t have another DACA problem down the road.”
Read more at USA Today.