Government Shutdown Continues over Border Wall Funding; President Trump to Make Address Regarding an Offer to End Government Shutdown; Democrats May Reject White House Offer on Ending Government Shutdown; President Trump Announces Upcoming Meeting with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: The U.S. military has not said why the Americans traveled to the busy commercial city of Manbij. This is the largest loss of American life in Syria since the counter- ISIS campaign started in 2014. Three other Americans were also hurt. Our deepest condolences to all of the families. We've got so much more straight ahead in the Newsroom, and it all starts now. Hello again, and thank you so much for being with me this Saturday. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. We are now entering week five of the longest U.S. government shutdown in history -- 800,000 federal workers still without a paycheck as Democrats and Republicans battle it out over the president's demand for a border wall. So in just two hours from now, the president will, once again, take his argument to the American people. Promising a, quote, major announcement concerning the southern border. A source tells CNN the president is expected to propose extending protections for DACA recipients in exchange for the wall, something the president is not willing to back down on -- the wall.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I hope that Speaker Pelosi can come along and realize what everybody knows, no matter who it is, they know that walls work. And we need walls. And whether it's personal or not -- it's not personal for me. She's being controlled by the radical left, which is a problem. And she's under total control of the radical left. I think that's a very bad thing for her. I think it's a very bad thing for the Democrats. Everybody knows that walls work.</s>WHITFIELD: Meanwhile, House Democrats are not willing to budge on the border wall. We saw that in their latest plan. They will propose to -- which offers no funding for the wall. So where does all of this leave the shutdown and the thousands of federal workers? Let's check in with CNN White House reporter Sarah Westwood. So we'll hear from the president in just a matter of hours. What's expected?</s>SARAH WESTWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well, Fred, we expect President Trump to lay out a broader deal than he's offered so far throughout this process. It would essentially involve the president trading funding for his border wall in exchange for immigration reforms that have been priorities of Democrats for a couple of years now. The deal would involve President Trump holding firm with that demand of $5.7 billion in money to build his wall in exchange for a renewal of temporary protections for Dreamers, those young undocumented immigrants protected under DACA, a program Trump has tried to end. It would also renew temporary protected status for some groups of immigrants and allow those people who remain in the country. Let's take a step back. This is not a new idea. It's one that the president in the past has not supported. In fact, in recent week, President Trump has been saying that he'd prefer to wait for legal challenges to his DACA removal attempts to make their way through the courts before he negotiates on DACA. Nonetheless, though, the White House wanted to project an image of progress after a week of an escalating feud between President Trump and Speaker Pelosi. White House aides worked into the night last night trying to get this proposal ready for this Saturday afternoon announcement. Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney were all in charge of crafting this proposal that President Trump will announce. Democrats, though, Fred, have said that they are in no mood to make a deal until the government is open. So it's unclear if this is the thing that breaks the logjam.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, Sarah Westwood at the White House, thank you so much for that. Let's check in now with CNN's Ryan Nobles. So how will this proposal from the president go over with Democrats?</s>RYAN NOBLES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Fred, the sense we're getting is not very well. Sarah talked about the fact that Mick Mulvaney and the Vice President and Jared Kushner spent a lot of time crafting this proposal. One thing they didn't apparently do was extend that propose am to the Democratic leaders that would play a big role in seeing this through the Congress. In fact, one senior Democratic aide telling me just a few minutes ago, quote, "Democrats were not consulted on this and have rejected similar overtures previously." They call it a "non- serious product of negotiations amongst White House staff attempting to clean up messes the president created in the first place." And "POTUS is holding more people hostage for his wall." And to put some of this in context, Fred, keep in mind that the Democrats did put on the table, back when the Republicans controlled the House, a proposal where they would offer President Trump $25 billion for physical wall funding, but that was in exchange for a permanent path to citizenship for the Dreamers that would solve the DACA problem. Now, at the time President Trump threatened a veto on that proposal and it was ultimately pulled back. Now, there are some saying, well, if the Democrats offered this before, why aren't they agreeing to this deal this time around? Because what we understand is that the president is going to offer the Bridge Act, which is different from the original proposal that would have protected Dreamers permanently. This Bridge Act was designed by Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, and the goal was to be a bridge, as it's called, to just protect those Dreamers on a temporary basis until a long-term plan could be put into place. So the sense that we're getting from Democrats is they're not going to exchange any money for a physical wall, even if it's only $6 billion, for a permanent structure in exchange for only temporary status for these Dreamers. They're not going to trade permanent for temporary. So that's why the sense right now is that this proposal is dead on arrival before it is even actually introduced to Democrats. And Fred, we should keep in mind, with all of the caveats, we never know exactly what the president is going to propose until the words actually come out of his lips. But it's important to keep in mind that at this point Democrats are completely in the dark and they don't know what the president is going to propose. But what they've heard so far from media report, they are just not impressed, and that's one of the reasons that this shutdown is probably going to continue to go on.</s>WHITFIELD: Ryan Nobles, thank you so much. Let's talk further about all of this with Molly Ball, a national political correspondent for "TIME," and Seung Min Kim, a White House reporter covering Washington for "The Washington Post." Good to see you both. Oh, boy, here we go. So here, we're a couple of hours away, from the president making his announcement. And the Democrats are now saying, well, he never consulted us, never even shared any of this with us. So, Molly, why wouldn't the White House share something of its plan with the Dems so that when a big announcement is made, at least the White House can kind of control the message from there?</s>MOLLY BALL, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "TIME": Yes, well, the Democrats' feeling is, as they said in that statement that Ryan just read, this isn't a real negotiation. This is a sort of cosmetic attempt to convince the American people, because I think the president and the Republicans realize that they have been losing the battle for public opinion. They want to put something out there to counter the criticism that they haven't made any counteroffers, that they haven't offered any compromise. But the Democrats feel that a real negotiation takes place behind closed doors. A real negotiation takes place between the parties that actually have the power to hammer something out, not through public announcements where there is no input, there is no ability to horse trade, or whatever is done in a traditional negotiation. This president is not a traditional negotiator. And we still don't know what he is going to say. But, as Ryan was saying, what we are hearing he is going to say would be a nonstarter because the Democrats don't feel that it's acceptable.</s>WHITFIELD: Right. The Dems saying we've seen this overture before, and if it didn't work then, why, Seung Min, would anyone believe that it would work this time? What is the real strategy here? Is this a plan, an announcement from the White House that really is to galvanize support to get government up and running again? Or is this kind of a public showing of trying to one-up? How do you assess this?</s>SEUNG MIN KIM, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it is a measure to at least show the public that there might be some forward movement after days, nearly a week-and-a-half of no actual discussion between the president and the two Democratic leaders. But, again, this is a proposal that is going to go nowhere in this Congress for many of the reasons we've discussed earlier. And I want to also point out another reason why this deal is unacceptable to Democrats. It's because Dreamers themselves, the immigrants who would benefit directly from these protections, have said over and over that we do not want to be, quote, bargaining chips for a wall that we do not support. And Democrats have leaned heavily in on that.</s>WHITFIELD: This underscoring the temporary versus permanent. You have a temporary extension for a permanent structure. Go ahead.</s>KIM: Exactly. And that's precisely why. But I do think that talking with a number of Republican senators and Democratic senators this week on Capitol Hill, Democratic senators still say they are not feeling pressure from their base. They feel like the more that they stand firm with their Democratic leaders against dealing, particularly while the government is closed, with the administration, that the court of public opinion is on their side, and they feel that the Republicans will come closer and closer to them because they are the ones feeling the pressure. And I do want to point out, some recent polling this week that shows the president's personal approval rating has been on a decline. I found the NPR/Marist poll pretty interesting in that regard where it does show a decline, not just overall, but also with his key base of support. We're talking about white evangelical voters, suburban men, registered Republicans, and those are really clear signs that the president needs to watch.</s>WHITFIELD: And we're looking at the president arriving back at Andrews Joint Base after paying respects to four Americans killed in Syria, and a ceremony taking place at Dover Air Force Base. So Molly, as we continue to look at the pictures of the president upon his arrival, and now he's just two hours away from his statement at the White House, you were nodding your head that, yes, Democrats feel like they kind of have the court of public opinion on their side, and they don't really need to work as hard at budging to the president's request. But the president usually is very responsive to polling and to approval ratings, and it has dipped. However, he continues to dig in his heels about the wall being the right thing to do. This is what he had to say this morning before he went to Dover. Listen.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We have a lot of people in caravans coming up. If we had a wall, we wouldn't have a problem. But we don't. We have too many open areas. The walls that we fixed and the walls that we built hold beautifully. Everybody knows that walls work. The Border Patrol has done an incredible job, but we need the help and the backup of the wall.</s>WHITFIELD: So Molly, he continues to say everybody knows walls work, except there are a lot of experts who are saying walls don't do, and are not as effective as the president is professing. So will he change his tune? Or does he have any incentive to change his tune?</s>BALL: Well, I learned long ago never to try to predict what President Trump is going to do. However, I think there's a couple of things. He has sent conflicting signals on this, does it have to be a wall question, right. There have been various times, including in his national address, where he talked much more about border security as a whole. And you have people on Capitol Hill saying, well, this is a game of semantics. It isn't. It's a wall or it's not. But if the president can be convinced to convince his supporters that some kind of border security package is the equivalent of, or is as effective as a wall, then he might get somewhere, but as long as it is wall, period, you're not going to see Democrats come along with it. The other thing I wanted to add to the prior discussion about DACA and the Dreamers is that part of the reason this a temporary protection is a nonstarter with Democrats is that the Dreamers already have temporary protection because the courts have stopped the administration from implementing the end of DACA that they tried to do. So the Dreamers have temporary protection for as long as that decision lasts. What the Democrats want is some kind of permanent legalization, what they want is citizenship for the Dreamers, and that is not something the administration has ever been willing to put on the table. Final thought, there's two ways you can read what the president is doing today. One way is, OK, he's going to start winning this battle now that he has shown that he is the reasonable one, he is making an overture, and it's the other side that has dug in its heel, that's one avenue. But the other way you can read it is he's shown that he is willing to give, and that means that maybe he is willing to give some more and maybe he is willing to cave.</s>WHITFIELD: So real quick, Seung Min, either he is showing he is willing to give, or perhaps he has even forgotten himself the various sequence of events that have happened, leading up to this, because some of the overtures that he is willing to make today reportedly seem to be overtures that have already been made, whether they were failed, or offered some incentives.</s>KIM: Exactly. There was a broader version of this deal that was offered a year ago in the previous shutdown impasse. But Vice President Pence himself has rejected, when we asked him on Capitol Hill, what about a DACA for wall deal? It was I believe a week ago, though the timeline in my brain can be warped sometimes, but a few days --</s>WHITFIELD: It's happening to all of us.</s>KIM: -- when the Vice President explicitly rejected that, though he said the president would like to wait until the Supreme Court indicates whether it will weigh in on this DACA case, one way or the other. The president has also contradicted that since. So there is a lot of mixed messaging coming from this administration, and that's why Democrats feel especially confident that they can hold firm on where they are because, as Chuck Schumer has argued, negotiating with the president is like negotiating with Jell-</s>O. WHITFIELD: Seung Min Kim, Molly Ball, we'll keep it right there for now. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Right now, Women's Marches are happening across the country, but some are facing criticism over comments from organizers. Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz even stepped away from the march in Washington. We'll ask her why, next.