Staurday in the White House

Dammit, he was supposed to be partying and collecting checks at Mar-A-Lago and playing golf, not waiting for Congress to fix a budget.

It fell to John F. Kelly, his chief of staff, who is also a newcomer to high-stakes legislative talks, and is still learning to channel Mr. Trump’s fluctuating impulses, to haggle over the details with Republican leaders, who have become accustomed to plunging into tricky negotiations without a clear sense of what the president would accept.

  NY Times

He'll accept whatever Kelly tells him to, if Kelly's the one doing the negotiating. I wonder if there's ever been a Chief of Staff in history who did the president's work for him.

In fact, it was Mr. Trump who opted not to pursue a potential deal that he and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, had hashed out over lunch at the White House on Friday. The proposal would have kept the government open, funded a border wall and extended legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, while including disaster aid funds and money for a federal children’s health insurance program. Mr. Kelly later called Mr. Schumer to say the agreement lacked sufficient immigration restrictions.

[...]

“What’s even more frustrating than President Trump’s intransigence is the way he seems amenable to these compromises before completely switching positions and backing off,” [Schumer] said on the Senate floor. “Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O.”

[...]

Mr. Trump shuttled between the presidential residence and the Oval Office, where he spent some time in the afternoon.

Some time having photos taken to show that he was working.

What do you want to bet there's no one on the other end of that phone?

Throughout the day, he monitored television coverage that toggled between the government shutdown and the women’s marches, one of which ended near the White House.

And pretended they were marching to praise him.

The president spoke with the Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, to discuss the impact of the shutdown on border security and the military. He met at the White House with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and spoke by phone with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, and the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, to strategize on a path forward.

Kevin McCarthy has been in the news a lot lately, which seems a bit odd, since he hadn't been talked about much at all since he took his position as majority leader. He was once up for Speaker of the House but dropped out at the last minute - and I do mean last minute - they were gathered to vote - right after another representative sent a letter to the Republican Conference Chair saying that any candidates with "misdeeds" should withdraw. Rumor was McCarthy was having an affair with another rep, Renee Ellmers. Of course, that's NOT why he dropped out, you understand. He dropped out because, he said, "We need a fresh face." Also (with his wife at his side), "I don’t want to go to the floor and win with 220 votes. [...] I think the best thing for our party right now is that you have 247 votes on the floor.” Yes, that's believable.

McCarthy is also the guy who in the summer of 2016 said (and denied saying) that there were two people who Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. He also co-sponsored the bill denying federal funds for abortion, and opposes making insurance companies cover abortion - AND maternity leave. And, as you might suppose, he is all for stripping public land of protected status and doesn't believe in climate change. At least he doesn't want to reduce factory emissions, so he says there's no such thing as climate change. Oh, and hate crimes. He voted against hate crimes prevention acts, for DOMA, and against medical marijuana for veterans.

But, I digress.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Saturday that the president refused to negotiate on immigration issues until there was a deal to reopen the government.

Isn't the immigration issue at the heart of making a deal to reopen government?

[E]ach time [Trump] has drifted toward such a bargain — first at a dinner last year with Mr. Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, then at a large meeting in the Cabinet Room this month with lawmakers in both parties, next in phone conversations with Mr. Graham and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and again on Friday with Mr. Schumer — he has snapped back to a hard-line position.

Conservative Republican lawmakers and proponents of immigration restrictions in his inner circle at the White House, led by his senior adviser, Stephen Miller, and Mr. Kelly, have often been the ones to intervene, pushing the president to take a harder line.

[...]

Yet Mr. Trump has complained privately about his own advisers’ attempts to stiffen his spine on immigration. In the Cabinet Room meeting this month, the president erupted when an aide distributed a list of conditions that included restrictive interior enforcement measures. “I don’t know what this is,” the president said, according to a person briefed on the exchange, which was first reported by The Washington Post, and said he did not appreciate being blindsided by his own staff.

A Trump adviser painted a different picture, saying that Mr. Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat, had expressed anger at the document, and that Mr. Trump, who often plays to the crowd in front of him, was merely joining in the outrage.

Either way, it's a sign of a president who doesn't know what the hell is going on.

On Saturday, the president was left alternately defiant and angry, self-pitying and frustrated. He argued to aides that he did not deserve the blame he was taking, but without a credible deal on the table, there was little for him to do. Irritated to have missed his big event in Florida, Mr. Trump spent much of his day watching old TV clips of him berating President Barack Obama for a lack of leadership during the 2013 government shutdown.

Sad!

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