President Donald Trump started his Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday as he normally does — taking aim at special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in a series of tweets, insisting there was “NO Collusion.”
He also aired grievances on some other topics, including funding for his border wall, previewing what could be a major fight in Congress to close out the year before its new members take office in January. Trump again threatened a government shutdown over his signature campaign promise and said he would “close the Border permanently if need be.”
He continued his fearmongering on immigration and the caravan of Central American migrants traveling through Mexico en route to the U.S. border. Providing no proof, he attacked Mexico for not stopping “stone cold criminals” from migrating.
His tweets came after Border Patrol agents on Sunday unleashed tear gas at migrants and closed a major border crossing for several hours.
On Sunday night, the president also falsely accused CBS’s “60 Minutes” of airing “a phony story about child separation,” claiming that his predecessors also separated undocumented children from their families at the border, as the Trump administration did this summer under its zero tolerance policy.
In reality, neither President Barack Obama nor President George W. Bush had the “exact same policy,” as Trump claimed. Under previous administrations, families would be deported together. If family separations did occur, they were only in limited contexts.
Trump’s array of weekend tweets failed to mention several major stories from the weekend. He did not address Friday’s major climate change report, in which 13 federal agencies issued dire new warnings about the increasing dangers of climate change.
And he made no mention of the escalating tensions between Ukraine and Russia in Crimea. Russia seized multiple Ukrainian naval vessels on Sunday after a standoff, heightening the conflict that began in 2014 when Russia annexed the region from Ukraine.
On Monday, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called on Russia to release Ukraine’s ships and crew members.