The president is making a list, and checking it twice: Those who have wronged him.
"I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back," Donald Trump tweeted, seeking to blame his political rivals for the border wall funding feud that has shut down the government.
It was the 10th tweet in a steady stream — mostly complaints — that he aired on the day before Christmas: Democrats oppose his border wall plans but supported border fencing in the past, he wrote in his first tweet.American allies "take advantage of their friendship with the United States, both in military Protection and trade," he complained. Defense Secretary General James Mattis didn't understand how "these countries take total advantage of the U.S.," he said in a third tweet.
Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy for the coalition to defeat ISIS who resigned this week in protest of the president's removal of troops from Syria, "was the Obama appointee" involved in the "horrific Iran Nuclear Deal" that was approved by "Little Bob Corker," the president said in a fourth tweet.
"The only problem our economy has is the Fed," he wrote in another tweet, this one about the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates this month. "The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can't score because he has no touch — he can’t putt!"
In his seventh and eighth tweets of the day, the president added the media to the list.
Complaining of a story that said he had lashed out at his acting Attorney General, Trump wrote: "This is a made up story, one of many, by the Fake News Media!" He argued that border wall reporting had been inaccurate, seeming to suggest inaccurately that he could build a wall with existing dollars, even though he's seeking more than $5 billion for it.
The string of tweets come on the third day of a government shutdown, as the president seeks to encourage a lame duck Congress to put billions of dollars of funding into his border wall before Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January, and a day after the president moved up Mattis' retirement.
The president said in another tweet Sunday that Mattis would leave his position two months earlier than planned, after Mattis wrote a critical resignation letter.
The shutdown began on Friday at midnight, after Trump said he would not sign a continuing resolution pushing the spending battle to after the holidays. It requires 420,000 employees to work without pay and an additional 380,000 employees to be sent home from work without pay, according to a fact sheet compiled by Senate Democrat staffers.
The president also tweeted on Monday: "AMERICA IS RESPECTED AGAIN!"
