Trump followed his typical playbook by drumming up drama over whether or not he would sign the omnibus spending bill. Trump even promised a press conference, but what he delivered as a 20 minute mentally ill rant where he answered two questions.
Video:
Trump goes off on what can only be described as a mentally ill bender. https://t.co/itOF4cnzaZ pic.twitter.com/HaDIADqi69
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 23, 2018
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Trump claimed that Democrats hate the military, demanded that the Senate be turned into a rubber stamp and that he be given line-item veto.
Trump said, “Therefore, as a matter of national security, I’ve signed this omnibus budget bill. There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill but we were in a sense forced if we want to build our military, we were forced to have. There are some things we should have in the bill. But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like, they gain. I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old. Some people don’t know — $1.3 trillion. It’s the second largest ever. President Obama signed one that was actually larger which I’m sure he wasn’t too happy with either. But in this case, it became so big because we need to take care of our military. And because the Democrats who don’t believe in that added things they wanted in order to get their vote. We have to get rid of the filibuster rule. We have to get rid of the filibuster rule. And go to 51 votes in the Senate if we’re going to have really sustained success. DACA recipients have been treated extremely badly by the Democrats. We wanted to include DACA. We wanted to have them in this bill. 800,000 people and actually it could even be more. And we wanted to include DACA in this bill. The Democrats would not do it. They would not do it. To prevent the omnibus situation from ever happening again, I’m calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all government spending bills and the Senate must end. They must end the filibuster rule and get down to work. We have to get a lot of great legislation approved and without the filibuster rule, it will happen just like magic.”
The rant went on and on and on. Trump had guest stars (members of the cabinet), and the whole point was to avoid taking more than a couple of questions.
Trump promised the American people a press conference, but what came out of his mouth were the ramblings of a wannabe authoritarian who is frustrated that he doesn’t have unilateral power. Trump wants to weaken the power of the minority in the Senate by ending the filibuster. He also wants to take the purse strings away from Congress with a line-item veto, with the overarching message being that Donald Trump, who can’t handle the powers that he currently has, wants even more power.
The President is not well. The Russia investigation is dominating his mind, and pushing him to frantic lengths in a bid to hold on to power.
America got a one-sided rant from an unstable president instead of the press conference and accountability that democracy requires.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
