Trump closes out 2018 with a litany of complaints

President Trump spent the last day of 2018 in much the same way he began the year — venting his anger on Twitter.

With a partial shutdown of the federal government entering its second week, thanks to his stand-off with congressional Democrats over $5 billion in funds to help build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump began New Year’s Eve explaining his rationale for suggesting that some portions of his “big beautiful wall” might instead consist of a “Steel Slat Barrier.”

The news media had largely based its reporting on the see-through wall on Trump’s own tweets on the issue and on outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly’s admission to the Los Angeles Times that the president had long ago modified his signature promise of the 2016 presidential campaign. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said, leaving Trump in damage-control mode.

Further clouding the question of what, exactly, the proposed $5 billion would be used to build, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., came out of a Sunday meeting with the president declaring that the wall “has become a metaphor for border security.”

Graham had also gone to the White House to complain about Trump’s abrupt decision to declare victory over ISIS and withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. While Graham told reporters he had prevailed in persuading Trump to hold off taking all U.S. ground forces out of Syria immediately, Trump nevertheless demanded credit for his administration’s efforts to destroy ISIS.

The “other places” Trump invoked where he had reportedly decided to remove U.S. troops included Afghanistan. This prompted retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to criticize any such pullout, as “weakening” the incentive for the Taliban to deal with the United States. Asked if he could work for Trump, McChrystal, who resigned in 2010 after leveling criticism at President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden, bristled: “I think it’s important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it.”

One of the slogans for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign will be “Promises made. Promises kept,” and the president spent much of the day assuring supporters that it was apt.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last Thursday found that more Americans blame Trump rather than Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown, despite his campaign promises and the many years he has criticized Democrats on the issue of border security. While media coverage of that poll may gall Trump, the recycled McChrystal soundbites also seem to have left a mark.

Having canceled much of his previously planned 16-day vacation at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida, Trump chided Democrats for leaving him “all alone” in Washington over the holidays, but meanwhile left himself open to criticism.

Some White House reporters noted that when the president fired off this tweet announcing that he was in the Oval Office, no Marine was standing guard outside the West Wing door, signifying that Trump was not, in fact, where he said he was.

More importantly, while Democrats did vote in favor of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized construction of 700 miles of fencing along portions of the U.S. border with Mexico, it was a fraction of the barrier Trump is now seeking to build. The 2013 vote that passed the Senate by a margin of 67-27 approved the construction of 700 miles of border fencing and a doubling of the number of border agents, but it also cleared the path for citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, something conspicuously lacking in Trump’s proposal.

With Democrats hammering the Trump administration over the deaths of two migrant children in U.S. custody, the president sought to reframe the construction of the wall as a moral imperative.

When the Democrats — emboldened after retaking control of the House of Representatives — return to Washington from their winter break, they will promptly vote on their plan to reopen government. The House will vote on Thursday on a package that funds the Department of Homeland Security at current levels and kicks in $1.3 billion for border security, but does not allocate money for Trump’s wall.

After a four-hour break from tweeting, Trump returned to the site in the late afternoon to lash out at Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., over his refusal to approve several nominees to ambassadorships and other government posts.

Although fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact have found that Democrats do indeed bear some of the blame for slow-walking the confirmation of some of the president’s nominees, they also conclude that Republicans are responsible for the delays. Moreover, as the Atlantic noted in November, Trump had not even nominated ambassadors in 18 countries, including Mexico, Pakistan and Egypt.

Already 10 tweets into his day, the president paused to wish the nation “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Then he returned to his unbacked assertion that his border wall was, in fact, already being paid for by Mexico.

From there, Trump made clear how he felt about the proposal to reopen the government without $5 billion in funding for the wall.

Given the overall climate of intransigence, the nation can almost certainly look forward to yet another year of presidential tweets similar in tone to the one that kicked off 2018.

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Read more from Yahoo News:

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