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On the first anniversary of his presidency on Saturday, with the stock market roaring and his poll ratings finally rising, he had planned to rest at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, feted by friends and admirers.
Instead, Trump stayed in Washington, bogged down in yet another crisis in his short presidency after he was unable to avert a government shutdown.
His failure to win passage by the US Congress of a stopgap bill to keep funds flowing to the federal government further damaged his self-crafted image as a dealmaker who would repair the broken culture in Washington.
Even as the White House began pointing the finger at Democrats on Friday in a steady messaging effort, blame for the shutdown also was directed at the Republican president.
"It's almost like you were rooting for a shutdown," said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of Trump after the Senate refused to approve a shutdown-averting funding bill.
Trump, who in July 2016 said, "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it," also said past government shutdowns were the fault of the person in the White House.
In a "Fox & Friends" interview after a 2013 shutdown, he said then-President Barack Obama was ultimately responsible.
“The problems start from the top and have to get solved from the top,” Trump said. “The president is the leader, and he’s got to get everybody in a room and he’s got to lead.”
As this new shutdown, the first since 2013, started looking increasingly likely on Friday, Trump made a last-ditch effort to behave as the kind of problem-solver he long claimed to be.
First, he postponed a long-planned weekend trip to his winter home Mar-a-Lago, where a lavish $100,000-a-couple fundraiser on Saturday would extol his first year in office, reports Reuters.
He had little choice. Critics would have hammered him for attending such a glittery event while government workers were being put on leave and many government services curtailed.
Then, Trump invited Schumer to a meeting at the White House on Friday afternoon. It was intimate, just the president, Schumer, and top aides. Republican leaders were excluded. The idea was to find some common ground. And it lasted 90 minutes.
Both Trump and Schumer afterward spoke of progress, but the president quickly reverted to the same stance he and other White House officials had taken earlier in the day: If a resolution were to be reached, it would have to involve the Senate passing a four-week funding extension passed on Thursday by the House.
Schumer had pressed for a short-term bill, of a week or less, and he said he even put on the table funding for Trump's long-desired wall along the US-Mexico border.
Trump had repeatedly linked wall funding to Democrats' goal of a comprehensive deal to preserve legal protections, under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants that came to the United States as children with their parents.