For President Donald Trump, this weekend was supposed to be a celebration.
On the first anniversary of his presidency on Saturday, with the stock market roaring and his poll ratings finally rising, he had planned to rest at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, feted by friends and admirers.
Instead, Trump stayed in Washington after failing to win passage by the US Congress of a stopgap bill to maintain funding for the federal government.
"This is the One Year Anniversary of my Presidency and the Democrats wanted to give me a nice present," Trump said in an early morning tweet, adding the hashtag DemocratShutdown.
Trump, who in July 2016 said: "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it" has asserted that past government shutdowns were the fault of the person in the White House.
After a 2013 shutdown, he said then-President Barack Obama was ultimately responsible.
As this new shutdown, the first since 2013, looked increasingly likely on Friday, Trump made a last-ditch effort to behave as the kind of problem-solver he has long claimed to be.
First, he postponed a lavish $US100,000 ($A140,000)-a-couple fundraiser on Saturday, given critics would have hammered him for attending while government workers were being put on leave and many government services curtailed.
Then Trump called Democrat Chuck Schumer, and, after a positive conversation, invited him to a meeting at the White House in a bid to find common ground.
One person familiar with the events said the two men agreed to seek a grand deal in which Democrats would win protections from deportation for some 700,000 young undocumented immigrants known as "Dreamers" and Trump would get more money for a border wall and tighter security to stem illegal immigration from Mexico.
By early evening, however, that plan was dead. The source said Trump had spoken in the meantime with conservative Republicans and been hit with their objections to the deal with Schumer.
"He did not press his party to accept it," Schumer said later.
Members of each party blamed the other for the shutdown, but some of the blame landed on the president.
Trump blamed Democrat lawmakers in a Twitter post early on Saturday.
"Democrats are far more concerned with illegal immigrants than they are with our great military or safety at our dangerous southern border," he said. "They could have easily made a deal but decided to play Shutdown politics instead."
Share
