president was planning on spinning this deal as a win. you may recall his friends in the conservative media, sean hannitt hannity, who originally called this a garbage deal, here is how he characterized it. garbage deal, $1.37 billion not enough but it will keep the ball and the project moving along. so there was a, you know uh-huh. silver linings kind of thing going on on fox news last night. but president trump apparently today back to the garbage deal part of that sentence. which is befuddling and implies it s surprising. we have sat at this table and i have said before nancy pelosi is not going to give him a ton of money, certainly not for a concrete wall but he ll get something for border security and use that to build a fence and he can call it a win, she can call it a win and everybody
president will have the wisdom to sign the bill so the government doesn t shutdown, basically channeling what i have been hearing over the course of the last couple of days. that is really the outstanding issue. i m told they are reviewing the proposal. as to what the proposal is we had a good sense of the top lines. $1.37 billion for border barriers. in total about 55 new miles of wall. republicans are saying they got a win in the number of detention beds bumping the number up from the current allocated level to about 45,000 beds. democrats saying they think they can move that down as the fiscal year moves forward. about $1.7 billion in homeland security funding for things like technology, personnel. mitch mcconnell was on the floor and put it probably the best way which is that nobody will be entirely happy with the deal. everybody if they wanted a reason to oppose it probably could. i refer back to senator chuck grassley saying given the length of the fight and the 35-day
in the official record. it s crass but true. it keeps it front and center politically, which is just fine with president trump. it really is. he wants to keep the fight going. the fight brings in small dollar fund-raising to his campaign and it keeps his base excited. his political advisers understand it s time to move beyond the base, it s time to try to get those independent voters back and perhaps there s another way for him to do it. the president, since almost day one of his campaign has thought of the wall as an extension of himself and politically imperative for him to keep fighting for and so the fact that there is going to be a new fight, whether it ends up on the floor of the house and the senate or the court or both, politically it s fine with him. $1.37 billion in this compromise for wall funding less than $1.6 billion that passed the senate before the shutdown
i got up at 1:48, i did not finish it all, but berman speed read through all of it which is great for us. this includes, by the way, only a fraction, of course, of what president trump had demanded for border security. if this passes the house and the senate, the president then of course must sign it before midnight tomorrow to avoid another government shutdown. it s border security and a biceps work out all at the same time. that s how cuomo talks about it. we have senior white house correspondent for bloomberg news and joe lockhart, former clinton press secretary. we just touched on this on the break and david i want to start with you, is this reporting we saw this morning that the white house, right, calling on fox news host lou dobbs and sean hannity because the president needs some help, and he needs this to be spun as, hey, it may only have $1.37 billion for some sort of border barrier, but, the president got way more than would have if he hadn t done the
president had just heard about the contours of the deal on his way over to the rally and they even pulled away from the rally for a minute in which sean hannity called the offer garbage. so there s been a pretty quick recalibration of this. but i would argue to david s point that this deal that they re going to be voting on today has far less to do with the maul than it does to do with the 20 election. that s both in terms of the pressure to overt another shutdown which the president doesn t want on his tab at this point and on the president s ability to try to just begin remessaging what all of this means. we know what the contours of the wall are out of this, another 55 miles within the parameters that were already allowed and going to happen under kind of the existing law structure. and on the other side, on the democratic side, such pains by the democrats taken to make sure that the kind of guardrails for the way this money could be spent, the 1.37 billion, that it