House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a press conference Thursday that she suspects the meeting with President Donald Trump was probably a set-up.
Democratic leaders met with the White House Wednesday. The president walked in and asked if Democrats would give him his wall. Pelosi said "no" and Trump admitted he walked out, saying "bye-bye."
"I think the meeting was a setup so he could walk out,” Pelosi said. “I don’t even know if the president wants the wall.”
She said that Trump could only want the debate.
The meeting could have been another typical Trump negotiation, according to Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio.
In a Wednesday panel discussion, D’Antonio noted that Trump came up with his “walk away” negotiation tactic, but it hasn’t actually worked in the past.
Pelosi refused to answer what she would do if Trump declared a national emergency. The president seems to want to head in that direction, according to reports prior to his televised address Tuesday. She said that she thinks Trump likes the distraction from having to deal with other issues and prefers to zero in on his campaign issues.
She closed by saying that Trump is ultimately hurting his own voters by saying that he'll pull emergency management money from California. The majority of the fires that tore through the state were in rural areas, she said.
“Do you take an oath to the Constitution or an oath to Donald Trump?” Pelosi asked Republicans.
"When Democrats took the majority, we promised to listen to good ideas, wherever & whomever they came from. That’s why we voted to pass the GOP language to re-open government that the Senate already passed. But they still they refuse to take 'yes' for an answer," she tweeted after the press conference, hashtagging it #EndTheShutdown.
Watch the press conference below: