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By Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and Daniel Lippman

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DRIVING THE DAY
NEW: PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP spoke to reporters as he left the White House to go to Camp David for a meeting with his senior staff. Trump said they are expected to discuss North Korea, trade negotiations with China and the border wall.

-- ON THE SHUTDOWN: "It's a very important battle to win," Trump said, via pooler Cameron Joseph of Talking Points Memo. "This wall will pay for itself many times over the course of this year ... Most importantly it's about safety." He added: "You think I like doing this? I don't like doing this." HE ALSO SAID: "Everybody's playing games but I'll tell you this, I think the Democrats want to make a deal. ... This shutdown could end tomorrow or it also could go on for a long time."

-- ON DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY: "I may decide a national emergency depending on what happens over the next few days."

TRUMP said he intended to call "the head of United States Steel and a couple of other steel companies to have them come up with a plate or a design ... we'll use that as our barrier."

-- When asked if he can relate to federal workers not being able to pay their bills, he said: "I can relate and I'm sure the people who are on the receiving end will make adjustments, they always do." 28-second video

The president also confirmed he would be giving the State of the Union on Jan. 29.

SHUTDOWN ... DAY 16 ... SOME OBSERVATIONS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE WALL MEETING ... We spoke to multiple people in both parties who attended yesterday's White House confab on the wall. Here's what they said:

-- NO REAL PROGRESS. Sure, the room did not explode into a massive screaming match -- and that's a good start. But Republicans and Democrats are still miles apart and nowhere near ending this shutdown. This is could last another month or so, according to experienced aides who were in the room. Burgess Everett, Sarah Ferris and Quint Forgey with the latest

-- WAY, WAY TOO BIG: A few sources we spoke to say there were close to 50 people in the room yesterday for the wall negotiations. These deals are usually cut in rooms with a handful of people. There is no way to get a deal like this done in such a big group.

-- ONE WEIRD DYNAMIC: VP MIKE PENCE was leading the meeting, negotiating with Capitol Hill aides at the president's request. Needless to say, this is very unusual.

-- JARED THINKS HE'S RIDING HIGH: Jared Kushner, the president's senior adviser, said he was bringing good outside business knowledge to the wall negotiations. He said the reason the wall price was going up was because of an increase in customer utilization for the border. Customer demand, he said, results in overruns.

HERE'S THE REALITY: Neither side is going to convince the other of their position. The best either side can hope for is that they find a way that everyone saves face. According to people in the room, that is not close to happening right now.

THE BIG QUESTION -- With both the president and Democrats holding firm to their positions, will more Senate Republicans start agitating to try and push Mitch McConnell and the president to cut a deal?

DEMOCRATS NEXT PLAY ... SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI put out a statement yesterday saying that Democrats plan to pass individual appropriations bills, starting with Treasury and the IRS. PELOSI: "This action is necessary so that the American people can receive their tax refunds on schedule. The certainty of the tax returns of hard-working families should no longer be held hostage to the President's reckless demands."

BY THE WAY ... This is now the third-longest shutdown in American history.

Good Sunday morning. HAPPENING TODAY ... White House and congressional staffers will hold another shutdown meeting.

SUNDAY BEST ... SHUTDOWN SHOWDOWN -- CHUCK TODD spoke with MICK MULVANEY on NBC'S "MEET THE PRESS": MULVANEY on where things stand: "The discussion immediately turned to a bunch of technical requirements or technical requests that the Democrats were asking for the first time ever in these negotiations, so I think this is going to drag on a lot longer. I think that's, that's by, by intention."

-- ABOUT THAT CONCRETE V. STEEL WALL ... MULVANEY: "[The president] was willing to agree, and he mentioned this at the Rose Garden press conference, to take a concrete wall off the table. That is -- if that is not evidence of our willingness to solve the problem, okay, because again, what's driving this is the president's desire to change the conditions at the border.

"And if he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, 'See? He's not building a wall anymore,' that should help us move in the right direction."

JAKE TAPPER also spoke with MULVANEY on CNN'S "STATE OF THE UNION: TAPPER: "Is there any give in the $5.6 billion in terms of whether or not it has to be for a wall or whether it can be for more generally border security?" MULVANEY: "Oh I think the president has said for a long time that it's $5.6 billion for border security including the wall. We recognize things like technology and border crossings are important but certainly a barrier is important."

-- "Mulvaney: Cabinet secretaries looking for money to fund wall," by Victoria Guida

ON TRUMP DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY ... GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS spoke to HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN ADAM SMITH (D-WASH.) on ABC'S "THIS WEEK" via Quint Forgey: "The new Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Sunday that President Donald Trump is empowered to declare a national emergency as a mechanism for constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but warned that such a maneuver would likely be met with a legal challenge.

"'Unfortunately, the short answer is yes,' Rep. Adam Smith of Washington told host George Stephanopoulos during an interview on ABC's 'This Week,' noting that national emergency declarations have been used previously to build facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"'I think the president would be wide open to a court challenge saying, 'Where is the emergency?' You have to establish that in order to do this,' Smith continued. 'But beyond that, this would be a terrible use of Department of Defense dollars.'" POLITICO

-- CHRIS WALLACE spoke with SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS on "FOX NEWS SUNDAY" via Victoria Guida: "'We're looking at exploring every option available that the president has,' she said. 'Whatever action he takes will certainly be lawful.' She also argued that the president isn't 'holding anybody hostage' by not signing legislation that would fund government agencies other than the Department of Homeland Security.

"'He knows it's better if they can focus on getting all these packages done at once,' Sanders said. 'I'm not saying we oppose those' appropriations bills, she added, but said now is the time to resolve the issue of wall funding." POLITICO


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Welcome to America's Generation Energy, led by the women and men of the natural gas and oil industry, who are meeting unprecedented consumer demand for affordable and reliable energy while reducing the U.S. carbon footprint to its lowest level in a generation. See how we're doing it and join us at PowerPastImpossible.org.

THE STEP BACK -- NYT'S JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and PETER BAKER, "The Border Wall: How a Potent Symbol Is Now Boxing Trump In": "Before it became the chief sticking point in a government shutdown drama that threatens to consume his presidency at a critical moment, President Trump's promise to build a wall on the southwestern border was a memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.

"As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate - who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder - would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign. ...

"Now, Mr. Trump's fixation with a border wall - the material embodiment of his keep-them-out immigration agenda - has run headlong into the new realities of divided government, pitting him against Democrats who reject the idea out of hand.

"The impasse is particularly remarkable given that even some immigration hard-liners do not regard the wall as their highest priority and fear that Mr. Trump's preoccupation with it will prompt him to cut a deal that trades a relatively ineffectual measure for major concessions on immigration." NYT
-- "After years of Trump's dire warnings, a 'crisis' has hit the border but generates little urgency," by WaPo's Nick Miroff and David Nakamura.

A message from the American Petroleum Institute:

Welcome to America's Generation Energy, led by the women and men of the natural gas and oil industry, who are meeting unprecedented consumer demand for affordable and reliable energy while reducing the U.S. carbon footprint to its lowest level in a generation. See how we're doing it and join us at PowerPastImpossible.org.

THE IMPACT ... "Toll on Science and Research Mounts as Government Shutdown Continues," by NYT's Alan Blinder: "The shutdown, now in its third week, has emptied some laboratories across the country, forced scientists from the field, upended important scientific conferences, imperiled the flow of grant money and disrupted careful planning for future studies, some of which are time-sensitive. ...

"The impasse, current and former officials said, will eventually show in shutdown-size gaps in data that scientists often collect across generations. Time-sensitive observations, which are impossible to recover or recreate, are going unseen and unrecorded." NYT

-- BUT, BUT BUT: "Shutdown spares federal park rangers at site in Trump hotel," by AP's Ellen Knickmeyer and Stephen Braun: "Smithsonian museums are closed. There are no federal staffers to answer tourists' questions at the Lincoln Memorial. And across the United States, national parks are cluttered with trash. Yet despite the federal government shutdown, a historic clock tower at the Trump International Hotel remained open ... staffed by green-clad National Park Service rangers.

"'We're open!' one National Park Service ranger declared around lunchtime, pushing an elevator button for a lone visitor entering the site through a side entrance to ride to the top of the 315-foot-high, nearly 120-year-old clock tower.

"The Trump administration appears to have gone out of its way to keep the attraction in the federally owned building that houses the Trump hotel open and staffed with National Park Service rangers, even as other federal agencies shut all but the most essential services. ... The agency says the law that put it in charge of the site obligates it to keep it open, even as federal Washington closes around it." AP

-- "Amid backlash, Trump administration seeks to halt raises for top officials," by WaPo's Peter Whoriskey: "Federal agencies have been told to suspend pay raises for top Trump administration officials after an uproar from critics who said it was unseemly to reward top political appointees while hundreds of thousands of workers are going without pay during the partial government shutdown. The raises had been set to go into effect on Sunday, after a long-standing pay freeze for senior officials lapsed.

"The turnabout on the pay hike came late Friday in a memo from Margaret Weichert, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. ... The Weichert memo followed a Washington Post story on Friday afternoon reporting that scores of senior Trump political appointees were poised to receive annual raises of about $10,000 a year." WaPo

PLAYBOOK READS


PHOTO DU JOUR: Vice President Mike Pence, White House legislative affairs aide Ja'Ron Smith, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and others walk down the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office building after a meeting Saturday with staff members of House and Senate leadership. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

2020 WATCH -- NATASHA KORECKI in Des Moines, Iowa: "Warren regains footing in Iowa blitz": "Just two months ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren risked political backlash here by opting to avoid a trip to Iowa during the critical midterm elections - the only major potential 2020 candidate to do so.

"But less than a week into the new year, Warren already flipped that on its head, becoming the first major candidate to land on the ground in the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus state, lapping up media attention, locking down key staff and organizers, and capitalizing on pent-up 2020 Democratic excitement." POLITICO

-- "New DCCC chair Bustos vows to stay on offense in 2020," by Laura Barrón-López and Zach Montellaro

THE LATEST IN SYRIA -- AP'S ZEKE MILLER in Jerusalem: "President Donald Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that the U.S. military withdrawal from northeastern Syria is conditioned on defeating the remnants of the Islamic State group, and on Turkey assuring the safety of Kurdish fighters allied with the United States.

"Bolton, who traveled to Israel to reassure the U.S. ally of the Trump-ordered withdrawal, said there is no timetable for the pullout of American forces in northeastern Syria, but insisted it's not an unlimited commitment." AP


AT THE PENTAGON -- "Pentagon chief of staff Kevin Sweeney resigns," by CNN's Faith Karimi: "'I've decided the time is right to return to the private sector. It has been an honor to serve again alongside the men and women of the Department of Defense,' Sweeney said in a short statement posted on the Department of Defense website late Saturday night. Sweeney retired as a rear admiral in 2014. Sweeney served under former Defense Secretary James Mattis." CNN

FOR YOUR RADAR -- "Russia: Too early to consider exchange of U.S. spy suspect," by AP's Jim Heintz in Moscow: "Russia's deputy foreign minister has brushed back suggestions that an American being held in Moscow on suspicion of spying could be exchanged for a Russian citizen. The brother of Paul Whelan, however, tells The Associated Press that he can't help but question whether the events are connected. 'You look at what's going on and you wonder if this is just a large game of pieces being moved around,' David Whelan told the AP ...

"Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Saturday that discussing a possible swap involving Whelan and Maria Butina would be premature because Whelan hasn't been formally charged, according to Russian news agencies." AP

BONUS GREAT WEEKEND READS, curated by Daniel Lippman:

-- "The Real Roots of American Rage," by Charles Duhigg on the cover of the Atlantic's Jan./Feb issue: "The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives-and what we can do about it." The Atlantic

-- "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation," by BuzzFeed's Anne Helen Petersen: "I couldn't figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected." BuzzFeed

-- "Lessons From a Republican Survivor," by Kyle Peterson in the WSJ's "Weekend Interview" with Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas): "'This is how you win suburban women: Actually talk to them. Talk to their kids. Do things to make sure their kids are ready for the future. Don't be a racist, and don't be a misogynist. ... When people start thinking the average Republican is one of those things, then that impacts everybody. And so that's why you have to ensure that you distinguish yourself from that average.'" WSJ

-- "The People vs. Donald J. Trump: He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?" by David Leonhardt on the cover of NYT's Sunday Review: "The presidential oath of office contains 35 words and one core promise: to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' Since virtually the moment Donald J. Trump took that oath two years ago, he has been violating it." NYT

-- "Inside the Markle Family Breakdown," by Vanessa Grigoriadis in Vanity Fair's February issue: "Meghan Markle, a.k.a. the Duchess of Sussex, has become the darling of the British press and a royal Cinderella story. But her American family presents a more complicated story. Vanessa Grigoriadis digs deep to uncover the untold truths that turned one of the year's biggest stories into a fractured, Kardashianified royal fairy tale." VF (h/t Longform.org)

-- "At the peak of the Holocaust, Nazis murdered more than 14,000 Jews a day, scholar says," by LA Times' Melissa Healy: "At these three killing centers, members of Poland's once-thriving Jewish community were murdered with such efficiency and ruthlessness that, of roughly 1.5 million Jews who passed through their gates, a mere 102 would survive to bear witness. ... In August, September and October of 1942, [biomathematician Lewi Stone] calculated, German forces and their allies in Poland killed at least 1.32 million Jews. That averages out to 14,348 per day, every day." LAT

-- "The Philosopher Redefining Equality," by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker: "Elizabeth Anderson thinks we've misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society." New Yorker

-- "Father Time," by David Sedaris in the New Yorker: "I can't predict what's waiting for us, lurking on the other side of our late middle age, but I know it can't be good." New Yorker

-- "The Priest of Abu Ghraib," by Jennifer Percy in Smithsonian - per TheBrowser.com's description: "Sad life-story of a devout young U.S. army intelligence officer ... [who] once hoped to become a priest. Instead he works in the world's most notorious prison. ... When he falls ill, he thinks God is punishing him for America's conduct in Iraq. In fact, he has lung cancer, probably caused by fumes from burning garbage pits at Abu Ghraib. He dies at 32." Smithsonian

-- "What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America," by Jake Sullivan in the Atlantic's Jan./Feb. issue: "We allowed an important idea-American exceptionalism-to be hijacked and misused. Now we need to rescue that idea and let it guide America at home and abroad." The Atlantic

-- "1 Woman, 12 Months, 52 Places," by Jada Yuan on the cover of NYT's Travel section: "It was a dream job, visiting the globe's most alluring destinations on assignment. Here's what our 2018 Traveler learned in a year of almost nonstop travel." NYT
PLAYBOOKERS
SPOTTED: John Kerry and Walter Isaacson at Bullet's Sports Bar in New Orleans on Friday night after having had dinner at Bywater American Bistro -- pic ... Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) traveling from DCA to LaGuardia on the Delta Shuttle Saturday afternoon -- pic ... Jessica Biel having dinner at Rose's Luxury.

REMEMBERING HAROLD BROWN - AP's Will Lester: "Harold Brown, who as defense secretary in the Carter administration championed cutting-edge fighting technology during a tenure that included the failed rescue of hostages in Iran, has died at age 91. Brown died Friday, said the Rand Corp., the California-based think tank which Brown served as a trustee for more than 35 years." AP

WEEKEND WEDDING -- Elizabeth Frei, a special assistant to the assistant secretary for strategy, planning, analysis and risk at DHS, married Benjamin Duchek, a captain in the Army Reserve who is also building a technology consulting firm. With a pic. NYT

BIRTHWEEK (was yesterday): Chris Beauregard, who celebrated last night at Fritz Brogan's new Navy Yard establishment Mission Dos (hat tip: Lucien Zeigler) ... (was last Saturday): Sarah Grove of the WH office of intergovernmental affairs (h/t Austin Cantrell)

BIRTHDAYS: Eric Trump is 35 ... Joseph Whitehouse Hagin II (h/t Tom Hoare) ... Kimball Stroud (h/t Christine Delargy) ... Kate McKinnon of "Saturday Night Live" is 35 ... Tricia Russell ... Julie Chen is 49 ... former FBI director Louis Freeh is 69 ... Nancy Baker ... Hamilton Place Strategies partner Stuart Siciliano is 34 ... Henry R. Kravis is 75 ... Laura Belleville (h/t Jon Haber) ... Kelsey Hayes ... Michael Corn, senior E.P. of "Good Morning America" ... NBC News producer Shaq Brewster ... Chris Gordon is 24 ... David Polyansky, president of Clout Public Affairs of Axiom Strategies (h/t Chris Wilson) ... Natalie Boyse, special assistant in the office of the assistant secretary for
public affairs at HHS ... WSJ's James Taranto ... Michael O'Neil, an Obama WH and Airbnb alum (h/t Ben LaBolt) ... Ashley Bittner ...

... Olivia Nuzzi, Washington correspondent at NY Mag, is 26. She's celebrating on a road trip from Las Vegas to Antelope Canyon (h/ts Ryan Lizza and Michelle Fields) ... Olivia Martinez, communications manager at NARAL ... Alexandra Dakich ... WSJ's Kate O'Keeffe is 35 ... Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) is 59 ... Diego Galvez de Yturbe ... Jennifer Donelan ... Ariel de Fauconberg ... Kiel Brunner ... Julia Blakeley ... Jodi Jacobson ... Mark Hyman is 61 ... Scott Neumyer ... Daniel Francis ... Lola Elfman ... AP alum Matt Ford ... Dalit Toledano ... Peter O'Keefe ... Norman Prusslin ... Ashley Baker Hayes ... Chris Allen ... Kathleen Gayle ... Abby Gunderson-Schwarz ... Kate Randle ... Mandy
Lynn Bowers.


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