Trump Today: President bashes Maxine Waters after she calls for ‘push back’ on cabinet members

This column provides a daily update on key presidential actions as well as comments, whether spoken aloud or on Twitter, by President Trump. Like the stock market, the deadline for Trump Today action is 4 p.m. Eastern time, even as we acknowledge that substantive news can and does occur after hours.

President Donald Trump on Monday attacked Rep. Maxine Waters for her comments about “push back” on cabinet members, as he said migrants should be stopped at the border, and met with the king of Jordan.

‘BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR MAX!’

Trump lashed out on Twitter at Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who called over the weekend for members of Trump’s cabinet to be heckled in public.

Waters said, “if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Trump charged that Waters had called for “harm to supporters” and said, “be careful what you wish for Max!” He also called her “low IQ,” something he’s said at least twice this year already.

The back-and-forth between Trump and Waters came as a flap involving Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, remained in the news. Sanders said she was asked to leave an eatery called the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., on Friday night because she works for Trump. The restaurant’s owner said she would have done the same thing again.

On Twitter, Trump criticized the Red Hen’s appearance, saying it had “filthy canopies, doors and windows,” and that it should focus on cleaning them instead of refusing to serve people like Sanders. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!” he said. A report in the Daily Beast noted the Red Hen passed its most recent health inspection with flying colors.

MIGRANTS ‘MUST SIMPLY BE STOPPED AT THE BORDER’

A day after he called for deportations without due process of undocumented immigrants, Trump doubled down and said on Twitter, “People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally.” He also reiterated his longstanding call to build a border wall, as House Republicans were planning to push ahead this week with a vote on a compromise immigration bill that includes money for the wall.

Yet the House measure faces long odds in the chamber, with conservatives and moderates split over issues including a path to citizenship for “dreamers” brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

LATEST SLAP AT DOJ, FBI

Trump questioned why the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation haven’t given members of Congress documents related to an FBI informant contacting members of his campaign in 2016. “I have tried to stay uninvolved with the Department of Justice and FBI (although I do not legally have to), because of the now totally discredited and very expensive Witch Hunt currently going on,” Trump said on Twitter, using his term for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It’s not the first time Trump has suggested he would intervene in a fight over documents — he also did so in May.