President Trump signed into law a $1.3 trillion spending bill just hours after he had threatened to veto it on Friday, blasting the legislation in impromptu remarks and warning Congress he would not sign anything like it ever again.
Trump had Washington on edge after sending a Friday morning tweet that he might veto the bill, which almost certainly would have triggered a government shutdown at midnight.
{mosads}Tensions ran high in Washington when the White House announced it would cancel the daily press briefing and instead send the president to the podium to address the nation, which was seen as another signal that Trump could veto the bill.
After several minutes of remarks, in which Trump at one point stepped aside to allow Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to talk about tariffs, the president finally acknowledged that he had signed the bill.
Trump proceeded to vent his frustration at the bill and the process by which it reached his desk, saying that it had been released late in the week and that nobody could have possibly read all of the 2,200-plus pages.
“You tell me who can read that quickly,” Trump said, looking over at the stack of paperwork.
“I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump added. “I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old. Some people don’t even know what’s in it.”
In a Friday morning tweet, Trump said he was frustrated that the bill did not include enough funding for his long-promised border wall or protections for young immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Trump’s veto threat came despite an assurance the president made over the past few days to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his own Cabinet members that he intended to sign the bill.
The president said Friday he was “forced” to sign it because he didn’t want to harm the military.
“There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill,” Trump said. “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but were in a sense forced to if we want to build our military.”
The president’s remarks about the process echo those of conservatives in Congress and on Fox News, who have fumed in recent days that the massive omnibus was forced on them shortly before the government spending deadline.
Many on the right believe that Republicans would have opposed the bill if Democrats were in power.
“We are very disappointed that in order to fund the military, we had to give up things were we considering many cases them to be bad for them to be a waste of money,” Trump said. “But that’s the way unfortunately right now the system works.”