Axios: When Donny Met Chuckie

In his first term, Donald Trump claimed he’d meet with anyone for peace – and proved it in a personal summit with Kim Jong-un. But would Trump go so far for peace that he’d transit Pennsylvania Avenue?

According to Axios, the answer is yes. Trump met with Chuck Schumer in a “surprise” visit yesterday, and perhaps it may prove difficult to determine which side would be the most surprised:

President Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) met at the White House on Thursday to discuss Trump’s hold on billions of dollars of funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project in New York.

Why it matters: It’s the first meeting between the two New Yorkers since last year’s explosive government shutdown battle. And Schumer used the opportunity to plead his case to the president on a list of issues, including a local one.

Schumer has a real ask for Trump in the Gateway project. Trump suspended $18 billion for new tunnels under the Hudson, a massive public-works project that will create jobs for years. That will benefit Democrats in charge of New York and New York City for a couple of decades, and Schumer needs the pork to get back in the barrel ASAP. 

Axios notes that Schumer had a couple of other asks, too. He wants Trump’s help to get Senate Republicans to pass an extension of the ObamaCare subsidies that eked out of the House on a discharge petition. Trump had gone back and forth on an extension, although not in the form created by the discharge petition. He also drew a hard line during the shutdown while only promising a vote on an extension rather than a deal. However, Schumer probably believes – and correctly – that it might be easier to get Trump to push for a compromise on extensions than getting John Thune to shift. Or, perhaps more to the point, that Thune can’t afford to shift unless Trump takes the lead.

What would Trump get out of meeting with Schumer, however? That may have to do with another ask from Schumer:

Schumer’s party is fuming over a string of ICE-involved shootings over the last two weeks, and some Democrats are itching for a fight with the White House over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

What some Democrats want is another shutdown, this time to shut down the Department of Homeland Security. That’s unrealistic, however, because DHS is very well funded for the rest of the year, regardless of what happens when the current CR runs out two weeks from now. Furthermore, as Democrats learned the hard way in the Schumer Shutdown, Trump can reorder spending based on critical services if the budget expires without new appropriations from Congress. 

Nevertheless, the ICE fight may be costing Trump some support. Axios also reported overnight that GOP internal polling on immigration enforcement has prompted serious concerns over the optics presented in the past couple of weeks:

President Trump’s team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration’s confrontational enforcement tactics.

• Now, as the chaotic scenes from Minnesota play out around the clock on TV and social media, Axios has learned that some Trump advisers quietly are talking about “recalibrating” the White House’s approach — though it’s unclear what changes Trump would embrace, if any. …

Zoom in: To the degree they support a more constrained approach, some advisers are playing to the president’s occasional misgivings about the optics of some ICE tactics.

• “I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants deportations. He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”
• “… There’s the right way to do this. And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”

This gets to the concerns over the midterms. Has ICE acted within the law? Yes. Are the conflicts a result of overreach by ICE agents, or by the defiance of “sanctuary” jurisdictions? The latter, clearly. However, the optics of the shootings and the riots are going to sap this effort politically as people question whether the juice is worth the squeeze. That may be unfair, but it’s a political reality. Also, the violence in Minneapolis has distracted from the massive fraud uncovered in Minnesota, and it may be turning Tim Walz’ optics from “corrupt buffoon” to “folk hero” in real time. 

In the short run, Trump needs to prevent another shutdown at the expiration of the current CR. He may want to leverage some ICE changes to get concessions on other parts of the budget negotiations. Schumer came to the White House to cut a deal, and Trump may have a need to cut a deal that softens the edges of his initiatives while allowing them to remain effective. If they start breaking ground on the Hudson, we’ll know they got down to business. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.

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