President Donald Trump continued to trade barbs with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) late Wednesday, saying that despite reports he walked out on a meeting with the lawmaker, he in no way had a “temper tantrum.”
Trump’s tweets were posted after a whirlwind of press conferences and media releases following the failed meeting, which was meant to hash out a bipartisan infrastructure plan.
Earlier in the day, Pelosi had declared that Trump was “engaged in a cover up” following the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election. Since then, Trump and his allies have been dodging congressional subpoenas and filing lawsuits en masse to block the release of the president’s financial information, at times flouting the law.
Then, shortly after Trump ended the three-minute meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the president spoke with reporters gathered in the Rose Garden and lambasted the pair, demanding Democrats “get these phony investigations over with,” referring to a spate of probes into Trump’s behavior and finances.
“Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up,” Trump said in the Rose Garden on Wednesday. “I don’t do cover-ups.”
“I walked into the room and I told Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi: ’I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that, that’s what I do. But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances.”
Later Wednesday, Pelosi issued a bristling letter of her own, telling her Congressional colleagues that the president “had a temper tantrum for us all to see.”
“Sadly, the only job the president seems to be concerned with is his own,” Pelosi wrote. “He threatened to stop working with Democrats on all legislation unless we end oversight of his administration.“