That DACA meeting

This account of the events surrounding Thursday’s explosive meeting is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House officials, Capitol Hill aides and lawmakers.

[...]

When President Trump spoke by phone with Sen. Richard J. Durbin around 10:15 a.m. last Thursday, he expressed pleasure with Durbin’s outline of a bipartisan immigration pact and praised the high-ranking Illinois Democrat’s efforts, according to White House officials and congressional aides.

The president then asked if Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), his onetime foe turned ally, was on board, which Durbin affirmed.

[...]

But when they arrived at the Oval Office, the two senators were surprised to find that Trump was far from ready to finalize the agreement. He was “fired up” and surrounded by hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who seemed confident that the president was now aligned with them, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting.

[...]

Trump complained that there wasn’t enough money included in the deal for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also objected that Democratic proposals to adjust the visa lottery and federal policy for immigrants with temporary protected status were going to drive more people from countries he deemed undesirable into the United States instead of attracting immigrants from places like Norway and Asia.

[...]

And as he shrugged off suggestions from Durbin and others, the president called nations from Africa “shithole countries,” denigrated Haiti and grew angry. The meeting was short, tense and often dominated by loud cross-talk and swearing, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the meeting.

  WaPo

But wait. There's more.

Attendees who were alarmed by the racial undertones of Trump’s remarks were further disturbed when the topic of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) came up.

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At one point, Durbin told the president that members of that caucus — an influential House group — would be more likely to agree to a deal if certain countries were included in the proposed protections.

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Trump was curt and dismissive, saying he was not making immigration policy to cater to the CBC and did not particularly care about that bloc’s demands.

Did he call the CBC a shithole caucus?

At one point, [Senator] Graham told Trump he should use different language to discuss immigration, people briefed on the meeting said.

[...]

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told Graham and Durbin their proposal would not fly, and he told the group they should instead embrace his more conservative bill. Durbin was not interested, White House officials said.

Graham and Durbin were not told there would be anyone else in the meeting with Trump,but they had worked with Republicans Jeff Flake and Cory Gardner and Democrats Robert Menendez and Mike Bennet before presenting their final proposal to Trump.

But some White House officials, including conservative adviser Stephen Miller, feared that Graham and Durbin would try to trick Trump into signing a bill that was damaging to him and would hurt him with his political base.

Ah, yes. Stephen Miller was bound to turn up in this story.

As word trickled out Thursday morning on Capitol Hill that Durbin and Graham were heading over to the White House, legislative affairs director Marc Short began to make calls to lawmakers and shared many of Miller’s concerns.

[...]

“Once we saw what was going on in the meeting a few days earlier, we were freaked out,” said immigration hard-liner Mark Krikorian, who runs the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump, he said, “has hawkish instincts on immigration, but they aren’t well-developed, and he hasn’t ever been through these kind of legislative fights.”

[...]

Soon, Goodlatte, one of the more conservative House members on immigration, was headed to the White House. Trump also called House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and asked him to come, McCarthy said. Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Cotton were also invited to rush over.

Because of a problem that should preclude Trump from holding office: he was too stupid to listen and understand what Graham and Durbin would be saying.

In the late morning, before Durbin and Graham arrived, [Chief of Staff John] Kelly — who had already been briefed on the deal — talked to Trump to tell him that the proposal would probably not be good for his agenda.

[...]

Trump was not particularly upset by the coverage of the meeting and his vulgarity after it was first reported by The Washington Post, calling friends and asking how they expected it to play with his political supporters, aides said.

“Everyone was saying it would help with the base,” which would agree with his characterization, one person who spoke with the president said.

[...]

There was little effort to significantly push back on the story that night because aides knew that Trump had said it and that the president wasn’t even too upset, according to people involved in the talks.

But, by Friday morning when Trump was watching television, it was obvious the shit had hit the fan, so he tweeted that he didn't say what he said.

Three White House officials said Perdue and Cotton told the White House that they heard “shithouse” rather than “shithole,” allowing them to deny the president’s comments on television over the weekend. The two men initially said publicly that they could not recall what the president said.

Lying by technicality. What difference would it make to the gist of the meeting if he said shithouse instead of shithole?

Meadows said he and Goodlatte were working to add a merit-based immigration policy to their conservative version. He said a majority of Republicans were not going to line up behind Graham and Durbin and should instead rally behind his proposal, which is unlikely to win support from Democrats.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.