Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s recently embattled White House chief strategist, has advised the president and senior staff to take a hard “stand” on border-wall funding this week—a game of chicken with lawmakers on Capitol Hill that threatens an imminent government shutdown.
“This is a stand worth taking,” Bannon told allies last week, according to two White House sources with direct knowledge who talked to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity to speak freely. “We’re drawing a line in the sand.”
“[Bannon] was pushing for this standoff, very hard,” another Trump administration official said. “He is 100-percent committed to this [specific] fight… to show that [the White House is] tough on immigration [enforcement], tough on the border—show they’re serious about the wall.”
Last week, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, signaled that the president was prepared to use the threat of a government shutdown at the end of this week as leverage to force Democrats into supporting some funding for building Trump’s desired wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The proposed trade, and set-up for a spending showdown, was clear: If Trump gets money for his wall, Democrats get money for Obamacare subsidies.
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