President Donald Trump has raged at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the upper chamber of Congress broke for its summer recess without approving a number of his nominees to top posts.
“Senator Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is demanding over One Billion Dollars in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees, who should right now be helping to run our Country,” Trump seethed on Truth Social on Sunday.
The billion dollar deal alluded to by the president, presented as though it were a ransom demand, refers to the Democrat’s request for the restoration of funding for foreign aid and the National Institutes of Health in exchange for the postponement of the month-long August recess to grant more time to push through the nominees.
Trump continued: “This demand is egregious and unprecedented, and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted. It is political extortion, by any other name. Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!
“Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
In a second post, the president continued: “Democrats, lead [sic] by Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, are slow walking my Nominees, more than 150 of them. They wanted us to pay, originally, two billion dollars for approvals. The Dems are CRAZED LUNATICS!!!”
The president is correct in saying that the veteran New Yorker is under pressure from his own party, as the latest polling continues to reveal Democratic discontent about their side’s “weak” response to the Trump administration’s many controversial policies.
A defiant Schumer replied to the president’s first post twice on X, first declaring that the decision to hold out on an agreement with the Republicans to delay the recess represented the “Art of the Deal” and then commenting, in reference to the Jeffrey Epstein saga: “Release the files, Donald.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for his part, said it was time to rethink the rules to stop parties employing stalling tactics, like demanding roll calls before each vote on a nominee’s confirmation, for short-term political gain.
“I think they’re desperately in need of change,” Thune said.
“I think that the last six months have demonstrated that this process, nominations is broken. And so I expect there will be some good robust conversations about that.”
Schumer said attempting to revise the rules when the chamber returns in September would represent “a huge mistake” and presented the failure to reach an agreement as a win, declaring: “Donald Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names, but he got nothing.”
“We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now,” he added.
Despite Trump’s frustration, the Senate has already waved through a number of his most contentious choices for major cabinet positions like Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr, most recently approving ex-Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to be the top prosecutor to Washington, D.C., and sending the president’s former attorney Emile Bove to the federal appeals court.
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