Retiring Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.) slammed President Trump for his recent threat on Twitter to close the southern border if Democrats do not agree to provide money to build his desired wall on the Mexican border.
“This struck me as like an angry eighth-grader’s tweet,” Costello said during an appearance on CNN on Friday.
“I don’t really know how to make sense of it because I don’t think he can do this even if he wanted to. It probably violates [the North American Free Trade Agreement],” he continued. “I don’t think he’ll have much if any support in Congress. Nor do I think logistically he’d be able to implement it.”
{mosads}“And when you start throwing out vacuous threats like this, people stop taking you seriously in terms of how you go about negotiating,” he added.
Trump made the threat to close the border as the federal government entered its seventh day of partial shutdown on Friday.
The federal government entered a partial shutdown last Saturday because of Trump’s demand for $5 billion in funding for a border wall.
Legislation that met Trump’s demand passed the House but failed in the Senate after the upper chamber was able to pass a clean continuing resolution that did not include the wall funding, which House leadership did not put up for a vote.
The new Democratic majority will take control of the House next week, but Trump has pledged he will not sign any government spending measure without sufficient border security funding.
The White House has since sought to blame Democrats for the shutdown, pointing to the passage by the House of a bill with funding for the wall, despite Trump’s past statements at a meeting with congressional Democratic leaders earlier this month in which he said he would embrace a shutdown over the wall.
“Remember, the president said that this is his shutdown,” Costello said.
Now, Costello said it’s not “clear on what amount of money he needs in order to sign a funding bill.”
“The ball’s in the president’s court, and we have no clarity on what he’s willing to accept or what he might sign,” he continued.
This also is not the first time Costello, who announced in March that he would not run for reelection citing the partisan political environment, has criticized the president.
In June, the retiring Republican lawmaker slammed the president on Twitter following an announcement that the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles would not visit the White House.
Costello, a self-declared “Philly sports fan,” said the president handled the meeting with the team poorly and added that he was “disappointed” in Trump’s decision.