It’s hard to imagine this going well: Congressional leaders from both parties are set to meet with the White House about the upcoming must-pass spending bill, even as Senate Republicans and Team Trump are struggling to get on the same page about it. As Republican Sen. Richard Shelby said, Senate Republicans are “basically close to the same page” with the White House, which is to say, nowhere near on the same page. This will be the first such bipartisan meeting since Donald Trump walked out of a May 22 meeting in a snit because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had dared to say he was “engaged in a cover-up” of Russian election interference.
Further undermining chances that this will go well is the fact that, as Democrats push for funding for domestic priorities, the White House is trying to pretend that Democrats, rather than the Republican tax cuts, are to blame for a rising deficit. “Unless Democrats show a willingness to negotiate and come off their unrealistic and unaffordable spending increases, then these meetings are just summer theater and things won’t change much,” an administration official told Politico. Which, screw you, because again, your tax cuts are to blame for the rising deficit, and Trump is constantly pushing to spend billions more on the military.
So while congressional Democrats and Republicans alike want to reach an agreement and avoid either a government shutdown or automatic cuts to both military and domestic spending, it’s all too likely that the White House plan is to block any chance at a deal and then blame Democrats, essentially using a bipartisan meeting as a pretext for doing so. (Though since that hasn’t gone so well for them in the past, you’d think they’d maybe find a new tactic.)