President Donald Trump signed a bill late Wednesday night to reopen the federal government. Trump criticized Democrats for using the shutdown to extort Republicans.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, thank you very much. This is a big day for tonight. Very important, but at the same time, because we’ve seen how good government we need and how bad government we need, and people don’t know what they’re doing. So in the last 42 days, Democrats in Congress shut down the government of the United States in an attempt to extort American taxpayers for hundreds of billions of dollars for illegal aliens and people that came into our country illegally, from gangs, from prisons, from mental institutions. They wanted to pay them $ 1.5 trillion, which would have really hurt our healthcare businesses and our recipients at levels never seen before. Today, we’re sending a clear message that we will never give in to extortion, because that’s what it was. They tried to extort. The Democrats tried to extort our country. In just a moment, I’ll sign a bill exactly like we asked Democrats to send us. All along, many days ago, this cost the country $ 1.5 trillion, this little excursion that they took us on. Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation of funding. There’s never been a time when one or the other party ever didn’t sign a continuation. It’s just a continuation, not a big deal. It’s a continuation, and we’ll talk later. Yet the extremists in the other party insisted on creating the longest government shutdown in American history, and they did it purely for political reasons. I want to thank Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, as well as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and numerous other great Republican leaders and congressmen and senators who are here and, frankly, spent a long time in Washington getting this thing to go away. I also want to thank the broad coalition of Americans that stood with us in this fight to reopen government, including the Teamsters, the American Federation of Government Employees, the Fraternal Order of Police, AMVETS, the National Small Business Association, the American Farm Bureau, the American Trucking Association. These are all incredible patriots. Airlines for America, the Allied Pilots Association, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and many, many others. Unions and non-unions. Over the past seven weeks, the Democrats’ shutdown has inflicted massive harm. They caused 20,000 flights to be canceled or delayed. They departed so many times so late. People were hurt so badly. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this one. This was a no-brainer. This was an easy extension. But they didn’t want to do it the easy way. They had to do it the hard way, and they look very bad, the Democrats do. They deprived more than 1 million government workers from their paychecks and cut off food stamp benefits for millions and millions more Americans in need. They caused tens of thousands of federal contractors and small businesses to go unpaid. And the total effect of the damage their antics caused will take weeks and probably months to really calculate accurately, including the serious harm that they did to our economy and to people and to families. So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this. When we come up to midterms and other things, don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.

RealClearPolitics Videos