Government shutdown - LIVE: Trump walks out of meeting with Democrats 'in temper tantrum' when Pelosi 'said no to wall funding'
President trying to 'stoke fear and divert attention' from administration's woes, say opponents
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has walked out of a White House meeting with Congressional leadership over the government shutdown after Democrats indicated they would offer no funding for his promised wall on the US-Mexico border.
“He asked [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, 'Will you agree to my wall?' She said no. And he just got up and said, 'Then we have nothing to discuss,' and he just walked out. Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn't get his way,” Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrat in the Senate said.
Mr Trump tweeted the meeting was "total waste of time" and said he offered to open up the government for 30 days if Democrats supported the building of the wall.
Democrat leader in the Senate has been speaking on the floor of the chamber this morning, calling on Mr Trump to re-open the government.
Like a number of other Republicans, Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia has said she wants border security. But she said there was "no way" the shutdown fight would drag on for years as Mr Trump warned last week.
"I think certainly I have expressed more than a few times the frustrations with a government shutdown and how useless it is," Ms Capito said. "That pressure is going to build."
Congressional Democrats say they will head to the White House with the plan to reopen the government — the same one they have been presenting for the last few days. They are asking Donald Trump to accept a bipartisan bill to fund border security without the wall.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the president "could end the Trump shutdown and re-open the government today, and he should."
That meeting is at 3pm ET (8pm GMT)
Ms Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer spoke at an event where they were flanked by federal workers going without pay during the shutdown.
Mr Schumer called workers the "collateral damage" of Mr Trump's "temper tantrum." A line he also used last night in discussing the president's Oval Office address. He said the president failed to "persuade a soul" during his "divisive" prime-time speech to the nation.
Republican Senator Susan Collins has said she hopes today's meeting with President Trump "can offer some constructive compromises on how we can get out of this impasse.”
In her earlier Fox News interview, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders admitted that she was incorrect when she wrongly claimed that 4,000 terrorists had been stopped at the southern border of the United States. The correct number was six.
“I should have said 4,000 at all points of entry, not just at the southern border. But the bottom line is whether it’s one, whether it’s four, whether it’s fourteen or four thousand - one terrorists coming into our country in illegal fashion to do us harm is one too many and we have to take every step possible to prevent that from happening, including protecting our most vulnerable points of entry, and we know that to be the southern border. We have to do what is necessary to protect our border, to protect the people, and that’s exactly what President Trump has done, and that’s exactly what he laid out in his speech last night.”
The shutdown is all about Mr Trump's promised border wall with Mexico, but will it ever be built how he wants it to be?
At a bill signing for anti-human trafficking legislation, Mr Trump says that the two parties in Congress on working together on border security. But he has again left open the door to a national emergency declaration.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell opened the Senate on Wednesday with an attack on Democrats for not supporting Mr Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for the wall.
It appears we are no closer to a compromise.
More from the earlier Democrat press conference over the shutdown:
“The shutdown is a negative, stupid, uncalled for, unnecessary, people-affecting crisis,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, of Maryland, said.
Representative John Sarbanes also of Maryland, took direct aim at the president.
“We need a leader, we don’t need a demagogue in the White House,” he said. “We need a president, we don’t need a grandstander. And so, Mr President, we beseech you, open the government.”
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