Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says President Donald Trump is willing to “take a concrete wall off the table” in negotiations with Democratic leaders over the shutdown.
In an interview airing Sunday on “Meet The Press,” Mulvaney said Trump’s offer of a steel fence instead of a concrete wall to bolster border security is evidence of his “desire to try and resolve this.”
“Let me tell you what — because that came up the other day in the private meeting with the big eight as they call the leaders in the House and the Senate, Republicans, Democrats, was that he was willing to agree… to take a concrete wall off the table,” he said.
“What's driving this is the president's desire to change the conditions at the border. And if he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, ‘See? He's not building a wall anymore,’ that should help us move in the right direction.”
According to Mulvaney, a steel fence “technically, it’s not a wall.”
Mulvaney accused Democrats in negotiations to fund the government and end a stalemate over Trump’s demand for $5.6 billion for his southern border wall of dragging talks out “by intention.”
“The discussion immediately turned to a bunch of technical requirements or technical requests that the Democrats were asking for the first time ever in these negotiations, so I think this is going to drag on a lot longer,” he said. “I think that’s… by intention.”