you are watching cnn. i m brooke baldwin. thanks for being with me today. president trump, there he is, will fist bump, shaking hands there in texas. just arrived at the south border town of mcallen. today is day 20. the shutdown talks over the president s push for $5 billion to pay for a wall or steel barrier along mexico is going nowhere. plus the president admits he thinks this trip will not change to quote him, a damn thing. worst of all, hundreds of thousands of federal workers will not get paid tomorrow and when tomorrow ends, it will mark the moment when this shutdown has become the longest in u.s. history. now, one possible exit strategy here for the president declaring a national emergency. the president said today and quoting him, i probably will do
the president. all of these things have to be taken into consideration when he is make ag determination to use the emergency powers. definition of emergency is courts will defer to the president on what the definition of emergency is. that is something to take into account. they have to look at the courts and where they are going to be challenged. if an injunction does issue on this then he is put right back in the same circumstance which is back negotiating and will have lost leverage. except the government will be open. that is the exit strategy. but if the goal here is to get real border security to secure our borders, to stop the humanitarian issues that are occurring along the border, the way to do that is to try to get a deal done now rather than through the courts and back to the table again and the immigration issue hasn t been solved. you might have just exposed the truth of this that this is
i think the biggest point of all this, his credibility when he talks about the crisis at the border simply has evaporated in many respects because he s talked about it so much and you can only scream fire so many times. if there is an exit strategy and off ramp in the conversation i didn t hear it. he was all over the place and you get the sense if this is what he brings to this meeting and you can see why they re already frustrated and that will only deepen frustration. you can t negotiate with him because all over the place. he says this is not what i wanted. he did understand this is hard for federal workers and he s called them patriots and many of them on social media are supporting him. i m sure some do. some clearly have made clear they want their paycheck, but not what i wanted. don t expect consistency department, this sitting in the oval office saying this is not what i wanted was the same president of the united states who just a few weeks ago with chuck and nancy said
shutdown. there s been no evidence of that so far. significantly, the president is going up to capitol hill to meet with senate republicans and many of them are nervous who have an exit strategy. in the middle of that he says let s do a big immigration bill. let s do a big immigration bill. the president walked away from a deal last year that was big, not huge, but big, where he could have legalized the dreamers, so-called daca recipients and gotten the money for his wall. the government is now shut down because the president doesn t have the money for his wall. what was that? so this is something in his third year of his presidency. he ll have to start dealing with his own record and what he did and didn t do. i m not sure if he doesn t remember and simply moving on. he has a chance for that. now the big open question, the structure has changed since last year. the divided government has changed. i don t know if democrats as we were saying earlier would even give him the same deal tha
last a lot longer, they have no real exit strategy here which democrats might see as a best casey casey isio for them. is he really thinking he s going to talk about a crisis and it will galvanize support for him and against the democrats? recall the president made the mid-terms a referendum of what he called a literal invasion along the southern border. that allowed democrats to win 40 seats. consider if tonight is not a show, the best option seemingly available to the president is to take the drastic step of declaring a national emergency, reopening the government at the same time and having to order the military to build the wall that leads to a bunch of court filings. the biggest emergency facing this administration is political and self inflicted. the president is boxed in. his claims about why he needs the wall and how he is going to