Donald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican Mike Johnson said on Sunday.
Trump’s climbdown comes days after he scrapped a planned meeting to discuss the crisis with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the respective Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate.
The president accused the pair of making “unserious and ridiculous demands” in return for Democratic votes to support a Republican funding agreement to keep the government open beyond Tuesday night – but left the door open for a meeting “if they get serious about the future of our nation”.
Johnson, appearing on CNN, said he spoke with Trump at length on Saturday, and that the two Democrats had agreed to join him and John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, for an Oval Office discussion Monday.
Related: Crunch time: Democrats ready for shutdown standoff over Republican health cuts
He did not say if Trump would be negotiating directly with the Democrats – but portrayed Trump as keen to “try to convince them to follow common sense and do what’s right by the American people”.
Schumer, talking to NBC’s Meet the Press, said he was “hopeful we can get something real done” – but was uncertain of the mood they would find Trump in when they sat down for the 2pm ET discourse.
“If the president at this meeting is going to rant, and just yell at Democrats, and talk about all his alleged grievances, and say this, that, and the other thing, we won’t get anything done,” Schumer said.
“We don’t want a shutdown. We hope that they sit down and have a serious negotiation with us.”
According to CBS News on Sunday, meanwhile, Trump is not hopeful the meeting will lead to an agreement.
The network’s chief national correspondent, Robert Costa, told Face the Nation he spoke with Trump by phone Sunday morning and that a government shutdown “looks likely at this point based on my conversation … He says both sides are at a stalemate.”
Costa said: “Inside the White House, sources are saying president Trump actually welcomes a shutdown in the sense that he believes he can wield executive power to get rid of what he calls waste, fraud and abuse.”
If no deal is reached, chunks of the federal government are set to shut down as early as Wednesday morning, with the White House telling agencies to prepare to furlough or fire scores of workers.
Republican and Democratic leaders have been pointing fingers of blame at each other for days as Tuesday’s deadline for a funding agreement approaches.
The narrow House Republican majority passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution earlier in September that would keep the government funded for seven weeks – but it faces opposition in the Senate, where it needs the support of at least eight Democrats to pass.
Democrats have made the extension of expiring healthcare protections a condition of their support, warning that planned Republican spending cuts would affect millions of people.
“If we don’t extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, more than 20 million Americans are going to experience dramatically increased premiums, copays, deductibles, in an environment where the cost of living in America is already too high,” Jeffries told CNN on Sunday.
“We’ve made clear that we’re ready, willing and able to sit down with anyone, at any time and at any place, in order to make sure that we can actually fund the government, avoid a painful Republican caused shutdown, and address the healthcare crisis that Republicans have caused that’s [affecting] everyday Americans.”
But Trump and Republicans have repeatedly accused their political opponents of exploiting the issue to force a shutdown while there was still plenty of time to fix healthcare before the subsidies expire on 31 December.
“The Obamacare subsidies is a policy debate that has to be determined by the end of the year, not right now, while we’re simply trying to keep the government open so we can have all these debates,” Johnson said.
“There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution, nothing. We didn’t add a single partisan priority or policy rider at all. We’re operating completely in good faith to get more time.”
Related: Democrats reject spending bill over healthcare cuts as shutdown looms
Thune, on Meet the Press, also attempted to blame Democrats for the potential shutdown and said “the ball is in their court” as to the next development.
“There is a bill sitting at the desk in the Senate right now, we could pick it up today and pass it, that has been passed by the House that will be signed into law by the president to keep the government open,” he said.
“What the Democrats have done is take the federal government as a hostage, and by extension the American people, to try [to] get a whole laundry list of things that they want.”
But US senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has previously urged his party leadership to be stronger in standing up to the Trump administration, said the problem was Republicans handing “a complete blank check” to the president to spend money on his own political interests, and not those of the nation.
“Until now the president has said he’d rather shut down the government than prevent those healthcare costs from spiking,” he told CNN.
“Democrats are united right now on this question. I’m glad we’re finally talking. We’ll see what happens.”