Conservatives say Trump caved, but confident he’ll get wall
By DEB RIECHMANN and STEVE PEOPLES, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — No retreat, no surrender is how President Donald Trump frames his decision to temporarily reopen the government while still pursuing a border wall deal.
Some of his conservative backers have a different take: “pathetic” and “wimp.”
Other Trump supporters seem willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, yet they insist that any ultimate government funding deal the president signs must include money for a wall.
Trump defended himself Saturday from the conservative backlash to his decision to end the 35-day-old partial government shutdown — the longest in U.S. history — without money for his promised border wall. He said if he didn’t get a fair deal from Congress, the government would shut down again on Feb. 15 or he would use his executive authority to address what he has termed “the humanitarian and security crisis” on the southern U.S. border.
After he announced his decision, a New York newspaper headline dubbed him “CAVE MAN.”
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, a big wall supporter, called Trump the “biggest wimp” ever to occupy the Oval Office. A conservative news outlet, Breitbart, dubbed Trump’s announcement on Friday a “short-term surrender to Democrats.”
Trump insists he didn’t cave to anyone and said the standoff with Democrats was far from over.
“Negotiations with Democrats will start immediately,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Will not be easy to make a deal, both parties very dug in. The case for National Security has been greatly enhanced by what has been happening at the Border & through dialogue. We will build the Wall!”
Earlier, Trump tweeted: “This was in no way a concession. It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!”
In California for a meeting of the Koch political network, Trump supporter and Koch donor Doug Deason of Texas said he was “severely disappointed” that the president agreed to reopen the federal government. Deason said he wanted Trump to go “nuclear” and keep the government closed as a way to cut the number of federal workers and would have preferred if Trump had used emergency funding to pay essential workers.
“We hired him to go shake up DC. We didn’t hire him to maintain the status quo,” said Deason, a member of the finance committee of America First Action, the only sanctioned pro-Trump super PAC.
While some of Trump’s backers have lobbed insults at the president, others are willing to give him more time to negotiate.
“I’m a pragmatist. I understand when you’re fighting a battle like this you have to do what’s necessary to keep certain parts of the government moving,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and a Trump confidant. “I think you have to do things like this to achieve a greater goal in the end. I believe that’s what he’s doing.”
Falwell encouraged Trump to declare a national emergency if Democrats haven’t agreed to wall funding by the time the current deal expires.
Another evangelical leader with Trump’s ear, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, said the president was smart to end the shutdown, even if some conservatives are angry.
“In this Round 1, the president was the one who appeared to be the more reasonable one. He was willing to negotiate and willing to compromise,” Perkins said. “There is wisdom here in what he did.”
Yet Perkins, like other more forgiving Trump supporters, acknowledged that the president must ultimately craft a deal that includes funding for the border wall.
Dan Stein, the president of a hardline immigration group called Federation for American Immigration Reform, put the onus on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, who pledged to negotiate once the government was reopened. “The ball is now in Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s court,” Stein said.
In many ways, Trump’s announcement in a chilly Rose Garden on Friday and the subsequent conservative backlash was a rerun of last month’s theatrics in the political standoff.
In December, when Trump offered signals that he might be willing to back off his threat to shut down the government over funding for a wall, conservative allies and pundits accused him of waffling on his campaign promise. Rattled by criticism from his own supporters, the president told House Republican leaders he would not sign a short-term government funding measure because it didn’t include money for the wall.
At the time, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., cheered Trump for digging in his heels, saying that the time to fight the fight for a wall had arrived. This time, Meadows backed the president’s decision and warned: “Executive action is still very much under consideration.”
But California-based conservative leader Mark Meckler, who helped found the tea party movement, called the president’s decision to sign off on a deal without wall funding “pathetic and disgusting.”
Trump badly damaged his credibility with grassroots conservatives across the country, Meckler said. During the shutdown, he said he and other conservative leaders had been aggressively defending the president’s hardline approach. At the request of the White House, he said they made repeated media appearances, but they got no warning he was about to “surrender.”
“No way would I go on the radio anytime again in the future and say ‘The president’ and ‘I believe,'” Meckler said. “Certainly, he did not fulfill his promise to the base and I’m appalled. More importantly than me is what I’m hearing from the grassroots. They’re appalled.”
“He brought his troops on the battlefield with an absolute promise. And then he walked away,” he said. But he added that he didn’t think it would prompt his supporters to vote for Democratic candidate over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
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Peoples contributed from New York. Associated Press writer Sally Ho in Indian Wells, California, contributed to this report.

20 dead as bombs target Sunday Mass in Philippine cathedral
JOLO, Philippines (AP) — Two bombs minutes apart tore through a Roman Catholic cathedral on a southern Philippine island where Muslim militants are active, killing at least 20 people and wounding 111 others during a Sunday Mass, officials said.
Witnesses said the first blast inside the Jolo cathedral in the provincial capital sent churchgoers, some of them wounded, to stampede out of the main door. Army troops and police posted outside were rushing in when the second bomb went off about one minute later near the main entrance, causing more deaths and injuries. The military was checking a report that the second explosive device may have been attached to a parked motorcycle.
The initial explosion scattered the wooden pews inside the main hall and blasted window glass panels, and the second bomb hurled human remains and debris across a town square fronting the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, witnesses said. Cellphone signal was cut off in the first hours after the attack. The witnesses who spoke to The Associated Press refused to give their names or were busy at the scene of the blasts.
Police said at least 20 people died and 111 were wounded, correcting an earlier toll due to double counting. The fatalities included 15 civilians and five troops. Among the wounded were 17 troops, two police, two coast guard and 90 civilians.
Troops in armored carriers sealed off the main road leading to the church while vehicles transported the dead and wounded to the town hospital. Some casualties were evacuated by air to nearby Zamboanga city.
“I have directed our troops to heighten their alert level, secure all places of worships and public places at once, and initiate pro-active security measures to thwart hostile plans,” said Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana in a statement.
“We will pursue to the ends of the earth the ruthless perpetrators behind this dastardly crime until every killer is brought to justice and put behind bars. The law will give them no mercy,” the office of President Rodrigo Duterte said in Manila.
It said that “the enemies of the state boldly challenged the government’s capability to secure the safety of citizens in that region. The (Armed Forces of the Philippines) will rise to the challenge and crush these godless criminals.”
Jolo island has long been troubled by the presence of Abu Sayyaf militants, who are blacklisted by the United States and the Philippines as a terrorist organization because of years of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. A Catholic bishop, Benjamin de Jesus, was gunned down by suspected militants outside the cathedral in 1997.
No one has immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attack.
It came nearly a week after minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation endorsed a new autonomous region in the southern Philippines in hopes of ending nearly five decades of a separatist rebellion that has left 150,000 people dead. Although most of the Muslim areas approved the autonomy deal, voters in Sulu province, where Jolo is located, rejected it. The province is home to a rival rebel faction that’s opposed to the deal as well as smaller militant cells that not part of any peace process.
Western governments have welcomed the autonomy pact. They worry that small numbers of Islamic State-linked militants from the Middle East and Southeast Asia could forge an alliance with Filipino insurgents and turn the south into a breeding ground for extremists.
“This bomb attack was done in a place of peace and worship, and it comes at a time when we are preparing for another stage of the peace process in Mindanao,” said Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. “Human lives are irreplaceable,” he added, calling on Jolo residents to cooperate with authorities to find the perpetrators of this “atrocity.”
Security officials were looking “at different threat groups and they still can’t say if this has something to do with the just concluded plebiscite,” Oscar Albayalde, the national police chief, told ABS-CBN TV network. Hermogenes Esperon, the national security adviser, said that the new autonomous region, called Bangsamoro, “signifies the end of war for secession. It stands for peace in Mindanao.”
Aside from the small but brutal Abu Sayyaf group, other militant groups in Sulu include a small band of young jihadis aligned with the Islamic State group, which has also carried out assaults, including ransom kidnappings and beheadings.
Abu Sayyaf militants are still holding at least five hostages — a Dutch national, two Malaysians, an Indonesian and a Filipino — in their jungle bases mostly near Sulu’s Patikul town, not far from Jolo.
Government forces have pressed on sporadic offensives to crush the militants, including those in Jolo, a poverty-wracked island of more than 700,000 people. A few thousand Catholics live mostly in the capital of Jolo.
There have been speculations that the bombings may be a diversionary move by Muslim militants after troops recently carried out an offensive that killed a number of IS-linked extremists in an encampment in the hinterlands of Lanao del Sur province, also in the south. The area is near Marawi, a Muslim city that was besieged for five months by hundreds of IS-aligned militants, including foreign fighters, in 2017. Troops quelled the insurrection, which left more 1,100 mostly militants dead and the heartland of the mosque-studded city in ruins.
Duterte declared martial law in the entire southern third of the country to deal with the Marawi siege, his worst security crisis. His martial law declaration has been extended to allow troops to finish off radical Muslim groups and other insurgents but bombings and other attacks have continued.
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Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.

Petteway scores 13, Robert Morris holds off Wagner 57-51.
MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — Malik Petteway scored 13 points, Jon Williams hit a clutch jumper and Robert Morris went 8 of 8 from the foul line in the last half minute to defeat Wagner 57-51 on Saturday.
The Colonials (12-9, 7-1 Northeast Conference), who have won four straight, had let a 12-point lead midway through the second half slip down to 47-45 when Wagner’s Elijah Davis made a pair of free throws with 1:32 to play. Williams knocked down his late-in-the-shot clock jumper with a minute to go, Josh Williams then made four-straight free throws and Matty McConnell made four straight.
Robert Morris led 24-19 at the half, when a total of 11 fouls were called and one free throw was shot. There were 24 fouls in the second half and Wagner went 15 of 16 from the line and RMU 15 of 17. Both teams shot less than 35 percent.
Romone Saunders scored 16 points for the Seahawks (9-10, 4-4), including three free throws and a 3-pointer in the last 10 seconds to force RMU to make free throws.