Donald Trump Will Head Straight to Mar-a-Lago After Declaring a National Emergency

President Donald Trump was, by all indications, set to announce a national emergency on Friday morning in an effort to circumvent Congress and secure funding for his long-promised border wall. After the announcement, he's planning to head to his Florida compound Mar-a-Lago.

Trump had said he would sign a bipartisan spending bill to avoid another government shutdown but, in turn, said he would declare a national emergency to secure funds for the wall.

"I had an opportunity to speak with President Trump and he, I would say to all my colleagues, has indicated he's prepared to sign the bill," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor on Thursday. "He will also be issuing a national emergency declaration at the same time."

Declaring a national emergency was an idea that Democrats, and many Republicans, had long said they did not support. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi warned of the precedent it set.

"Want to talk about a national emergency? Let's talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America," Pelosi said at a press conference on Thursday, referring to the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 people last year. "That's a national emergency. Why don't you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would. But a Democratic president can do that. A Democratic president can declare a national emergency as well. The precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans."

By Friday morning, the hashtag #FakeTrumpEmergency was trending across the U.S. on Twitter. People pointed out that the president—a longtime golf enthusiast that reportedly had a $50,000 simulator installed at the White House—was headed to one of his favorite places to play golf right after the important declaration.

While the White House often works to conceal whether Trump is golfing—he was a longtime critic of President Barack Obama enjoying the game and claimed he wouldn't play at all as president—but he visited a golf course more than 154 times in his first two years in office and was documented playing at least 70 times.

He had to halt his golf outings amid the government shutdown, seemingly since it would be a bad visual to hit the links while hundreds of thousands of government workers went unpaid. He did, however, get in a recent round with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.