Trump’s task: Saving face at the border

The agreement that lawmakers produced this week would allocate $1.375 billion for fencing along the border, even less than was on the table at one point last year.

President Donald Trump awaits the arrival of President Ivan Duque of Colombia at the White House on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Written by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman

In pursuit of a wall, President Donald Trump ran into one. A single-minded drive to force Congress to finance his signature campaign promise has left Trump right back where he started, this time seeking a way to climb over the political barrier in his way after trying to charge through it did not work.

As he inched closer to reluctantly accepting a bipartisan spending compromise without the money he demanded for his border wall, Trump offered no acknowledgment Wednesday that his pressure tactics had failed even as aides sought to minimize the damage by tamping down criticism on the right.

One call was made to Lou Dobbs, a favorite of Trump’s whose Fox Business Network show he often tries to catch live. Another was placed to Sean Hannity, the Fox host who regularly talks with the president. The message: The president deserved support because he still forced concessions that he would never have gotten without a five-week partial government shutdown.

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Trump says Pelosi 'playing games' on wall funds

President Donald Trump says he's not waiting on Congress to move forward with building his long-promised southern border wall. Trump pointed to work that's already underway at the U.S.-Mexico border with funding previously appropriated.

Even so, it was arguably the most punishing defeat Trump has experienced as president, and it left the White House scrounging for other ways to pay for a wall on the southwestern border and rethinking its approach to a Congress now partly controlled by Democrats. Trump’s inability to reach a satisfying deal despite the negotiating experience he regularly touted on the campaign trail suggested that any collaboration across party lines may be even more elusive than he had imagined.

“We shut down the government for 35 days, we put America through this crisis, we jeopardized our economy — for what?” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the upper chamber and a member of the House-Senate committee that negotiated this week’s spending deal. “Totally unnecessary.”