Politics - News Analysis

Trump Insists Federal Workers Are Fine With Not Getting Paid, ‘Mr. President, Keep Going, This Is Far More Important’

Donald Trump answered a few questions during Friday’s last-minute press conference in the Rose Garden about federal workers who are not being paid during the shutdown.

Trump spoke at one point about landlords going easy on workers, but he also ended the presser with the claim that federal workers are just fine not getting paid because they want the wall more.

The president said, “This really does have a higher purpose than next week’s pay. And the people that won’t get next week’s pay or the following week’s pay––I think if you ever really looked at those people, I think they’d say, ‘Mr. President, keep going. This is far more important.’”

This isn’t the first time Trump has made such a crazy assertion. On Christmas day, Trump said that federal workers supported his position in the fight with Democrats over billions of dollars in funding for the border wall.

“Many of those workers have said to me and communicated, ‘stay out until you get the funding for the wall,’” he said, when asked for his message to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers either furloughed or working without pay.

“These federal workers want the wall,” he added. “The only one that doesn’t want the wall are the Democrats.”

This of course is not true.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 700,000 federal workers, spoke out against the shutdown, noting that there “should be no confusion” about how federal employees feel about being out of a paying job.

“They are eager to get back to work,” the federation’s president, Jeffrey David Cox Sr., said in a statement.

“They unequivocally oppose using shutdowns as a means of resolving policy disputes. This is not about a wall, this is about 800,000 real people with real families and real bills to pay,” he said.

Paul Shearon, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, took an even stronger stance, calling the president’s claims entirely “false.” “We have not heard from a single member who supports the President’s inaction,” he said. “Most view this as an act of ineptitude.”

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