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One minute, there was a deal on DACA; the next, there wasn’t. Where it goes next is anyone’s guess.
On the September 15 episode of The Weeds, Matthew Yglesias, Tara Golshan, and Jeff Stein discuss the bipartisan “agreement” on DACA supposedly struck Wednesday night by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and President Donald Trump.
On Thursday night, Schumer and Pelosi released a joint statement about their meeting with Trump, saying, “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.”
The White House denied the deal almost instantly. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that night that funding for Trump’s infamous wall was not completely out of the question.
But then early Thursday morning, Trump tweeted several confusing statements about the future of DACA and the border wall, saying that he does not support “throw[ing] out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military.”
As for Congress on Thursday: “The next day, on Capitol Hill, it was like nothing had actually been agreed on and there was no deal and we are back at square one,” Tara tells Matt and Jeff. Pelosi, attempting to clarify confusion, reportedly told Democratic House whips, according to Politico, “We made a deal to make a deal. We made a deal to go forward.”
Meanwhile, as Matt points out, Trump’s tweets about immigration suggest that he disagrees with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s strong support of ending the DACA program. “[Trump] wants to make a deal in which he gets some border security in exchange for helping not deport the DREAMers — because he does not think that we should deport the DREAMers.”
Here are Matt and Tara discussing Trump’s budding relationship with Chuck Schumer:
MATT: A lot of the reports have come out with this funny subtext: After this whole campaign that was all about cultural grievances and rural white working-class people and how only Donald Trump understands NASCAR fans who live in the woods somewhere, Donald Trump is actually a rich guy from Manhattan, and he gets along really well with Chuck Schumer, who is also from New York, and [with] Nancy Pelosi, who grew up in Baltimore and lives in San Francisco. And he finds Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, these flyover country squares, to be really hard to get along with, and they have nothing in common.
Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump have different political opinions now, but they are very much two peas in a pod as, like, human beings.
TARA: They used to go to donor events together.
MATT: Right, Donald Trump used to be a major Schumer donor. Schumer is the only person in American politics who has a relationship of any kind with Donald Trump that predates Donald Trump’s emergence as the leader of an American fascist movement. So if anyone is going to talk him off a ledge, it does seem like it would be Schumer.
