LATEST: Trump just wished everybody a happy new year – twice, in two very different tweets.
New year, same old Donald Trump.
The US President marked the beginning of 2019 the only way he knows how – in a series of bizarre tweets.
Trump began the night with a short video clip in which he appeared to lightly guilt-trip Americans who were out celebrating.
“While I’m at the White House working, you’re out there partying tonight. But I don’t blame you,” he said in the tweet.
“Enjoy yourselves. We’re going to have a great year. Have a really, really happy new year.”
The tweet prompted a number of mocking responses including one which compared his predicament to his administration’s policy of detaining immigrants.
Then things got really weird as the President contradicted himself within 11 minutes and gave a brief history lessons about walls and wheels in tweets about his US-Mexico border wall.
Initially, he insisted Mexico would pay for the wall…
Then he swiftly changed his mind and decided the reason the project has stalled is because the Democrats were refusing to fund it…
Then came this tweet which is… quite something.
On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham said that the wall is simply a “metaphor” for border security, which would involve a “barrier where it makes sense”.
But Trump doubled down on his campaign-promised concrete wall on Monday, saying the idea of an “all-concrete wall” has “never been abandoned.”
Meanwhile, Democrats in the US House of Representatives plan to vote on Thursday on a funding package to end the 10-day-old partial U.S. government shutdown that is currently crippling much of the country.
Unfortunately for the president, it will not provide the $5 billion he has demanded for a US-Mexico border wall.
The planned vote sets up a Democratic showdown with Trump’s fellow Republicans on an issue dear to the president on the first day of divided government in Washington since he took office in January 2017 with a Congress led by his own party.
Democrats formally take control of the House from the Republicans after winning a majority of seats in November’s congressional elections.