Here’s What WH Chief Mulvaney Absurdly Claims is Trump’s Major Concrete Concession to Democrats in Shutdown Fight
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney spent his Sunday morning excusing Donald Trump‘s lack of basic knowledge and frequent use of profanity, but also found time to make a whopper of a claim about Trump’s supposed attempts to compromise with Democrats over the current government shutdown.
On Sunday morning’s edition of NBC News’ Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd pressed Mulvaney about the shutdown, which Trump himself has said “is about the wall,” and asked Mulvaney an interesting question.
“What is the president offering the Democrats? What’s the offer on their side?” Todd asked. “Right now it only is clear what the president wants.”
Mulvaney’s response was that Trump has generously offered to not call the wall a “wall” in exchange for funding for the wall:
Let me tell you what — because that came up the other day in the private meeting with the big eight as they call the leaders in the House and the Senate, Republicans, Democrats, was that he was willing to agree, and he mentioned this at the Rose Garden press conference, to take a concrete wall off the table. That is — if that is not evidence of our willingness to solve the problem, okay, because again, what’s driving this is the president’s desire to change the conditions at the border. And if he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, “See? He’s not building a wall anymore”…
That’s the big offer, which Mulvaney cleverly went on to point out is as meaningless as it sounds, even as he claimed it was a meaningful offer.
“Actually, under the way the law is written right now, technically, it’s not a wall,” Mulvaney said, adding “But if that’s not evidence of the president’s desire to try and resolve this, I don’t know what is.”
Unfortunately, not calling the wall a “wall” isn’t the big inducement that Mulvaney thinks it is, mainly because Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the whatchamacallit, which he repeatedly whatchamacalled “a wall” and “not a fence.”
Democrats are expected counter with an offer to technically refer to Trump as a “president.”
Watch the clip above, via NBC News.
