The president offered no indication of when the partial government shutdown might end, insisting that the thousands of federal workers still on the job through the Christmas holidays without pay were content making the sacrifice if it guaranteed funding for a wall at the border with Mexico.
“Many of those workers have said to me — communicated — stay out until you get the funding for the wall,” Trump said, speaking to reporters after a teleconference to offer holiday greetings to U.S. military personnel. “These federal workers want the wall.”
Trump and lawmakers have remained at odds as funding lapsed for nine departments and numerous federal agencies, with each side refusing to budge from their strongly held positions on border security and wall funding. Some lawmakers are becoming resigned to the prospect of the government remaining closed until the new year, when the majority shifts to Democrats in the House.
The president, who canceled his 16-day vacation to his Florida estate and instead remained in Washington, continued to offer contradicting assertions about the fate of his signature campaign promise.
“I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it,” Trump told reporters, a nod to the “artistic slats” he has started advocating instead of the concrete wall he once promised. “I’ll call it whatever they want. But it’s all the same thing. It’s a barrier from people pouring into our country.”
Trump insisted, without evidence, that the wall was being built and could be “either renovated or brand-new by Election Day” and reiterated his demand that Congress allocate billions of dollars for a wall.
During the question-and-answer session Tuesday, Trump again said that he was pushing ahead with a stretch of wall construction in Texas. But he declined to give any additional details.
Officials with the White House and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comments on specifics about the contract.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.