Donald Trump held forth for nearly an hour during a reality TV-style bipartisan meeting on immigration that more than anything placed a grenade in the laps of Republican lawmakers on the Hill. Forget for now the certainty that some Washington reporters are going to heap praise on Trump for stringing nearly-complete sentences together for all of about 55 minutes and remember this: Trump hung the DACA fix for some 800,000 Dreamers entirely around the necks of GOP leadership.
In fact, let’s just break this down to three big takeaways:
1. Trump stuck Hill Republicans with finding a solution for Dreamers
During the White House meeting, Trump declared: “My positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with.” Twisting the knife on GOP lawmakers a little more, he added: "There should be no reason not for us to get this done."
Nothing says leadership like “I’m totally behind you!” Republicans, who control the entire federal government, now own this problem.
2. Trump had no idea what he was talking about, complicating the negotiation
At one point, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein offered the idea of voting on a “clean” DACA bill immediately under the condition that lawmakers agree to move on comprehensive immigration reform immediately after. Trump agreed with that, except that he had no idea what she meant.
So Trump has now redefined “clean” to mean “with border security funding too.” When White House reporters tried to drill down on what exactly that means, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded with some version of clean is whatever Donald says it is. The president supports a "clean" DACA bill, Sanders told reporters, "only if you look at what the president's definition of a clean DACA bill is."
3. Paul Ryan is screwed
Just to be clear, Ryan loses some 30 to 50 votes right off the bat, even if the DACA fix bill includes some kind of border security right now, and the only way they could get Democrats to vote for that is if it was border security-lite (i.e. no big border wall funding).
Unfortunately, this entire White House event appears to have been nothing more than a “show meeting” for Trump in a “Hey look, he can talk!” kind of way.
White House officials say they are focusing in on a set of priorities—beefing up border security, adjusting the visa lottery system, ending chain migration—in exchange for the DACA fix, but they don’t offer specifics on any of those points.
Other notable bombshells came out of the show meeting too, like Trump’s support for bringing earmarks back, which was immediately slammed by conservative groups like the Club for Growth. As Jake Sherman observed:
But the most immediate takeaway is that the White House is confounding this negotiation, not helping it. That’s very bad news for the Dreamers who need immediate relief—and also bad news for Republicans, who are already splintered on the issue.