WASHINGTON -- The rift between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats appeared to be widening Thursday, a day after he abruptly ended a meeting with them at the White House on infrastructure.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday openly questioned Trump's fitness to remain in office.
"I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country," Pelosi said at her weekly news conference, adding that she prays for him and the nation.
Trump responded by calling her "crazy."
"She's a mess," Trump told reporters at an afternoon news conference in which he lined up White House staff members to testify to his calmness at the meeting. "Cryin' Chuck, Crazy Nancy ... I watched Nancy and she was all crazy yesterday," he claimed.
As for himself, he said, "I'm an extremely stable genius."
On Wednesday, Trump walked out of the meeting with Pelosi of California and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York, demanding an end to all congressional investigations before he would work with Congress on infrastructure and other matters. He repeated the demand in the Rose Garden moments after leaving the meeting.
By Thursday, as Congress prepared to recess for the Memorial Day break, both sides were questioning each other's stability, with the president insisting on Twitter that he was calm when he left the White House meeting after just three minutes.
Pelosi said Trump has established a pattern of unpredictability, and at one point she even joked about the 25th Amendment, the Constitution's provision laying out the procedure for replacing a president.
"Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence," she said. Asked whether she's concerned about Trump's well-being, she replied, "I am."
Pelosi also said the White House is "crying out" for the Democrats to open impeachment hearings. White House aides believe that if Democrats move to impeach, Trump would be acquitted in the GOP-controlled Senate, supporting his assertion that he's a victim of Democratic harassment and helping him toward re-election. But the president denied that he's urging the Democrats on.
"I don't think anybody wants to be impeached," Trump said.
Schumer blasted Trump on Thursday as "an erratic, helter-skelter, get-nothing-done president."
During a morning television appearance, Schumer said "the show" put on by Trump on Wednesday was intended as a "cover-up" of his administration's inability to work with Congress on legislative priorities such as infrastructure.
"If he were smart, he'd sit down with us," Schumer said on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "We want to do this, and he's incapable of it."
Asked at another point in the interview if he considers Trump a competent president, Schumer said no.
In a separate MSNBC interview, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., also suggested that Trump was a difficult person with whom to negotiate.
"Very frankly the sad thing is that there are too many instances where I've sat with the president in the White House ... where he says one thing and that representation lasts for minutes, for hours, maybe a few days at most, and then the position changes," he said.
Hoyer was also critical of Trump's decision to abruptly end the meeting on infrastructure.
"What we saw yesterday was a refusal to lead," Hoyer said. "He abandoned any leadership, any desire to move forward, any constructive engagement with the Congress of the United States."
In tweets late Wednesday and Thursday morning, Trump sought to portray Democrats as the obstacle to cooperation on infrastructure, prescription-drug costs and other issues.
In one tweet, he branded Democrats "THE DO NOTHING PARTY!"
"The Democrats are getting nothing done in Congress. All of their effort is about a Re-Do of the Mueller Report, which didn't turn out the way they wanted," Trump wrote.
He was referring to the report by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. House Democrats are continuing to look into whether Trump sought to obstruct the investigation and have been frustrated by what they call stonewalling from the White House in response to subpoenas related to that and other probes of the administration.
The rift has raised questions about whether Democrats and Trump could work together on must-do tasks this year, such as raising the debt limit and funding the government. White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said staff-level work on critical policy and spending continues.
But Sanders also said on CNN that it was "lunacy" and "insane" for Democrats to think everyone could just proceed after Pelosi accused Trump of a "cover-up" just before the meeting Wednesday.
"It's very hard to have a meeting where you accuse the president of the United States of a crime and an hour later show up and act as if nothing has happened," Sanders told reporters outside the White House.
Sanders insisted that Trump's walkout Wednesday wasn't planned before Pelosi's comments. Asked why Trump couldn't work with Democrats after Pelosi's comments, Sanders said, "The president's feelings weren't hurt. She accused him of a crime. Let that sink in."
About two dozen Democrats and one Republican have called to start impeachment hearings against Trump based on details Mueller's report suggesting that Trump repeatedly tried to block the investigation. Pelosi has resisted.
Instead she urged them to "follow the facts" by allowing court cases to play out before passing final judgment.
Since then, a federal court on Wednesday affirmed the House's right to obtain Trump's financial records, the second such ruling this week.
"What really got to him," Pelosi said, was "these court cases and the fact that the House Democratic caucus is not on a path to impeachment."
Pelosi, the second in line to the presidency, said she thinks Trump's actions Wednesday were part of his skill at distraction. But she also suggested that he's unpredictable.
"Sometimes when we're talking to him he agrees," she said, only to change his mind. "He says he's in charge and he may be."
During questions, Pelosi also joked with a reporter about the 25th Amendment. "That's a good idea. I am going to take it up with my caucus. Not that they haven't been thinking about it."
Information for this article was contributed by Laurie Kellman, Zeke Miller, Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick and Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; by John Wagner of The Washington Post; and by Glenn Thrush of The New York Times.
A Section on 05/24/2019