Trump complained all the way to signing the enormous spending bill

President Donald Trump held his first press conference in over a year to complain about the spending bill that he’s grudgingly signing into law, averting a government shutdown.

He’ll have you know he’ll never sign a bill like this again.

“I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump said. “Nobody’s read it, it’s hours old, $1.3 trillion, the second-biggest ever.”

Congress put the omnibus spending bill on the president’s desk to sign, after it passed in both the House and the Senate late Thursday. After threatening to veto the $1.3 trillion spending package in an early-morning tweet, the president complained about the legislative process and ultimately agreed to sign it.

Had Trump followed through on his threat, the government would almost certainly have shut down at midnight, for the third time in 2018. But it would’ve been all on him, since Congress sent him a spending bill. That wouldn’t have looked good for Trump. Top Democrats, in response to the tweet, said they wouldn’t make concessions on the spending bill if Trump chose to veto it.

He called on the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule, which requires a 60-vote majority in order to move legislation forward, and asked them to give him line-item veto authority, which was ruled in 1998 to be unconstitutional.

“I looked very seriously at the veto, I was thinking about doing the veto,” Trump said as he was leaving the briefing room. “Because of the incredible gains we were able to make for the military, that overrode any of our thinking.”

He spent the press briefing outlining the great gains the bill would bring to the military, including 90 new F-35s (“That’s the most sophisticated aircraft in the world,” Trump said. “Total stealth.”), and some new tanks and submarines. He’s consistently pushed for more military resources and surrounded himself with generals and hawks in his Cabinet.

But Trump couldn’t get everything he wanted out of Congress. He said he wanted an agreement on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, to be part of this spending bill, and blamed Democrats for their lack of action.

“I do want the Hispanic community to know, DACA recipients to know, that Republicans are much more on your side than Democrats, who are using you for their own purposes,” he said.

And he’s not getting his wall. Trump has long insisted that funding for DACA be contingent on a fully-funded wall along the southern border with Mexico. The bill does include $1.6 billion for border security, some of which is earmarked for repairing parts of the already-existing border fence, but it doesn’t fund Trump’s ambitious wall.

Trump had agreed to extend protections for DACA recipients for two-and-a-half years in exchange for $25 billion for his wall, a proposition which Democrats rejected, insisting on a pathway to citizenship.

He’s certainly disappointing some of his staunchest supporters by signing this bill. Rush Limbaugh, reacting to the president’s announcement, said “The Donald Trump agenda just got gutted," and “he’s stabbing me in the back,” according to Newsmax.