Top Democrats walk out of Syria meeting after Trump insults Pelosi

Source: Politico | October 16, 2019 | John Bresnahan, Melanie Zanona and Marianne Levine

“This was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts,” Chuck Schumer said of the meeting.

A high-level meeting Wednesday between President Donald Trump and top congressional leaders over the Syria crisis ended abruptly after Trump insulted Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which spurred Democratic leaders to walk out of the White House.

It was the latest blowup between Trump and top Democrats, and showed once again that the relationship between the embattled president and his Democratic counterparts has reached levels of toxicity rarely seen in any administration.

Just hours before the meeting, Trump made clear where he stood on the Turkish invasion of northern Syria: “It’s not our border.”

Trump told reporters Wednesday that his decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria — which was quickly followed by the Turkish attack on U.S.-allied Kurdish forces — was “strategically brilliant” while downplaying Russian intervention in the conflict.

“Our soldiers are out of there. Our soldiers are totally safe,” Trump said. “Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand — they’ve got a lot of sand over there, so there’s a lot of sand that they could play with…”

But Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Trump of having “a meltdown” during their meeting in the historic Cabinet Room.

The three Democrats said Trump appeared unhinged by a House vote condemning the Syria withdrawal, and the meeting quickly degenerated into a name-calling session led by the president, the Democrats charged. The trio walked out of the meeting before it was over, they told reporters afterward.

“[Trump] was insulting, particularly to the speaker,” Schumer said. “She kept her cool completely, but he called her a third-rate politician. And he said there are communists involved [in ISIS], and you guys might like that. This was not a dialogue; this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts.”

Pelosi said Trump appeared “very shaken up” after the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning the U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria and the abandonment of its Kurdish allies. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), GOP Conference Chairman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) were among the 129 Republicans who crossed party lines and voted for the Democratic-drafted measure, a dramatic slap at Trump in the midst of one the most serious foreign policy crises of his presidency.

“What we witness on the part of the president was a meltdown, sad to say,” Pelosi declared.

“We were offended – deeply – by his treatment of the speaker of the House of Representatives,” Hoyer added. “I have served with six presidents. I have been in many, many, many meetings like this. Never have I seen a president treat so disrespectfully a co-equal branch of the government of the United States.”

Democrats walked out after Trump let loose a stream of personal attacks on Pelosi, including calling her a “third grade politician.”

A Democratic source familiar with the meeting said it “devolved into the president calling the speaker a name. [Trump] was quite nasty, so she stood up to go. She started to sit back down but [Hoyer] got her to go. Pelosi and Hoyer walked out of the meeting.].”

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