‘Unserious and Ridiculous Demands’: Trump Cancels Budget Talks With Democrats as Shutdown Looms

President Donald Trump on Tuesday abruptly canceled a meeting with top congressional Democrats to discuss their budget demands, just a week before the deadline to fund the government and avert a shutdown.

A shutdown could lead to federal employees not being paid, as well as interruptions in some government services.

“After reviewing the details of the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their congressional Leaders could possibly be productive,” wrote Trump on the platform Truth Social, just hours after the Democrat leaders had publicly announced a meeting with him.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both D-N.Y., have demanded major health care policy concessions in exchange for allowing a seven-week stopgap funding bill to pass, which itself would further extend the spending levels of former President Joe Biden’s administration.

“They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free health care for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid [rolls], allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody,” Trump contended.

Trump concluded his mega-post by urging the Democrat leaders to moderate their demands.

“I look forward to meeting with them if they get serious about the future of our Nation. We must keep the Government open, and legislate like true Patriots, rather than hold American Citizens hostage, knowing that they want our now thriving Country closed. I’ll be happy to meet with them if they agree to the Principles in this Letter,” he wrote.

“Otherwise, it will just be another long and brutal slog through their radicalized quicksand. To the Leaders of the Democrat Party, the ball is in your court. I look forward to meeting with you when you become realistic about the things that our Country stands for. DO THE RIGHT THING!”

Jeffries was quick to fire back.

“Trump Always Chickens Out. Donald Trump just canceled a high-stakes meeting in the Oval Office with myself and Leader Schumer,” wrote Jeffries on X. “The extremists want to shut down the government because they are unwilling to address the Republican health care crisis that is devastating America.”

“When you’re finished ranting, we can sit down and discuss health care,” wrote Schumer in response to the news.

Congress is fast approaching a Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year deadline to fund the government, and little visible progress has been made in terms of bipartisan negotiations.

Republicans will require at least seven Democrat votes in the Senate in order to end debate and bring the stopgap funding bill to the floor, which would itself buy less than two months for more long-term negotiations.

Democrats have pushed their own counterproposal, which would involve extending expiring health care premium tax credits and undoing spending cuts, as well as hamstringing the administration’s ability to rescind appropriated funding in the future.

The House of Representatives passed its own stopgap funding bill on Friday, but an initial attempt to vote on it in the Senate failed the same day, when only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted to end debate.

The Senate is currently scheduled to return to work on Sept. 29, at which point Schumer’s Democrats would face a binary decision—let the bill come to the floor or accept a shutdown.

Of course, Trump has long had a history of difficult negotiations with Democrats. The longest government shutdown in United States history occurred from December 2018 to January 2019 when Schumer refused to grant the president funding for the construction of a border wall on the southern border.

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