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Trump’s bizarre Rose Garden news conference on impeachment, explained

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Trump speaks to reporters in the Rose Garden on Wednesday.

With momentum building toward impeachment hearings, the president threw a public temper tantrum.

President Donald Trump held a brief, bizarre news conference in the Rose Garden on Wednesday to complain about Democrats’ ongoing efforts to conduct oversight of his administration.

Trump held the presser after storming out of a meeting with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in which they were supposed to negotiate about an ever-elusive infrastructure bill. Fox News reported that Trump — ostensibly upset with comments Pelosi made earlier in the day accusing Trump of being “engaged in a coverup” — “walked into the Cabinet Room and immediately made his comments to the Democrats in the room. Then, as Pelosi began talking, Trump turned on his heel and walked back to the Oval Office.”

A short time later, Trump reemerged to give a news conference that doubled as a public temper tantrum of sorts. Trump — who steadfastly refuses to release his tax returns or even comply with congressional subpoenas — began by claiming, with a straight face, that he’s “the most transparent president probably in the history of this country.”

“This whole thing was a take-down attempt of the president of the United States,” Trump added, alluding to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of his campaign. “I don’t do cover-ups.” (The hush payments made to women during his presidential campaign indicate otherwise.)

Here’s how the news conference ended:

It was a bizarre spectacle. But Trump had his reasons for putting on a show.

Trump is upset that Democrats are moving toward impeachment hearings

Pelosi’s comments accusing Trump of being “engaged in a coverup” came following a meeting of the House Democratic caucus in which members, increasingly frustrated with the White House’s blanket stonewalling of subpoenas, pushed Pelosi to begin impeachment hearings.

“We do believe that it’s important to follow the facts. We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a coverup,” Pelosi said following the meeting, in comments that indicate she’s becoming more open to the idea of holding impeachment hearings and apparently set Trump off.

During his news conference, Trump referred to impeachment as “the big I-word” and indicated he feels it’s impossible to negotiate with Democrats while they’re insisting on fulfilling their constitutional duties to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

“You can’t do it under these circumstances,” Trump said. “Get these phony investigations over with.”

Trump reiterated that sentiment in a string of tweets posted after his news conference in which he claimed “[y]ou can’t investigate and legislate simultaneously — it just doesn’t work that way.” (Trump’s claim is contradicted by the fact that President Richard Nixon signed major pieces of legislation even amid the Watergate hearings.)

Pelosi, however, doesn’t seem to think her caucus is incapable of multi-tasking. During remarks she made at the CAP Ideas Conference following the news conference, she said she “wanted to give this president the opportunity to do something historic for our country” with an infrastructure bill, and found his decision to blow up the meeting “very, very, very strange.”

“This president is obstructing justice, and he’s engaged in a cover-up, and that could be an impeachable offense,” Pelosi said.

The House speaker may not quite yet be ready to call for “I-word” hearings, as she reiterated during a closed-door debate with one committee chair on Tuesday. But Pelosi is very much on board with Democrats’ quest to obtain Trump’s tax returns, the unredacted Mueller report, and congressional testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn — and there’s no indication that Trump’s offer to get serious about infrastructure if Democrats give up on investigating him is one she or any other Democrat is taking seriously.

Let’s face it: Infrastructure wasn’t happening anyway

In recent weeks, Trump has paid lip service to being interested in a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, but there’s no indication he’s willing to pay for it. (Democrats have floated the idea of rolling back some of the tax cut bill Trump signed late 2017 as a way to fund an infrastructure bill — a proposal that’s likely to be a nonstarter with Republicans.)

For instance, during an interview that aired last Sunday with Fox News’s Steve Hilton, Trump said he thinks “we’re being played by the Democrats” when it comes to infrastructure because “what they want me to do is say, ‘what we’ll do is raise taxes’ ... and they’ll have a news conference — ‘see, Trump wants to raise taxes.’”

But the fact remains that it costs money to make public improvements, and that money has always been the sticking point. The big questions center on how much the country should invest and where this funding should come from.

Trump, however, seems to be uninterested in putting forward the $2 trillion he’s said should be invested. As Reuters detailed in a piece previewing Wednesday’s meeting, an infrastructure proposal the Trump administration outlined last year “was widely panned” in part because it didn’t involve raising taxes but instead “largely relied on private sector and state funding.”

It’s likely that Trump, to the extent he had a plan heading into Wednesday’s meeting at all, wanted to go down a similar road this time. Pelosi and Schumer understood that type of proposal wasn’t going to gain traction with House Democrats, but wanted to give the appearance of doing what they can to get something done for the American people anyway.

Trump and the Democratic leaders don’t have the best history — and the future doesn’t look rosy either

Wednesday was not the first time Trump blew up a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer. Recall that back in January, he pulled a similar stunt when the Democratic leaders traveled to the White House in hopes of striking a deal that would end what became the nation’s longest government shutdown.

Note how similar the New York Times’s report about how that January meeting went down is to what happened on Wednesday:

Stunned Democrats emerged from the meeting in the White House Situation Room declaring that the president had thrown a “temper tantrum” and slammed his hands on the table before leaving with an abrupt “bye-bye.”

There are indications Trump’s decision to storm out of Wednesday’s meeting may not have been as spontaneous as he wants people to believe. The podium he used for his Rose Garden news conference was adorned with a prepared graphic about the Mueller investigation that misleadingly claimed Mueller found “NO Collusion” and “NO Obstruction.”

Democrats, for their part, aren’t about to concede that their efforts to oversee the executive branch and hold Trump accountable are nothing more than the “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT” he claims it is.

As Wednesday’s theatrics illustrate, the two are stuck at an impasse. For instance, during a House Financial Services Committee earlier Wednesday morning, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin indicated the Trump administration is prepared to take the fight over Trump’s tax returns all the way to the Supreme Court, even in the face of a newly leaked IRS memo concluding the Treasury Secretary has no lawful basis for refusing to turn them over to Congress.

In the end, the idea that Pelosi and Schumer could meaningfully engage with Trump on an infrastructure bill while he refuses to let Congress conduct oversight of his administration was farcical to begin with, as this tweet from the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein indicates:

Trump, for his part, is doing what he can without Congress. During the aforementioned interview with Hilton, he admitted as much when he bragged that “we’re changing laws as rapidly as we can get them through the courts” — an approach at odds with the reality that Congress is supposed to be in the business of changing laws.

Unwilling to accept the fact that Congress is an equal branch of government, Trump is leaving House Democrats with little choice but to pursue impeachment. But now that they’re getting more serious about it, he’s throwing a tantrum. And all the while the nation’s infrastructure needs continue to go unmet.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.



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