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Article snippet: Senate Minority Leader MORE (D-N.Y.) said in an interview published Saturday that he began planning his shocking debt ceiling deal with President Trump as far back as August. In an interview with the New York Times' "The New Washington" podcast, Schumer said he was thinking about his "leverage" with Trump back in August during a family vacation. “Even when I was on vacation with my family in August, I started looking,” Schumer said in the interview. “What’s our leverage?” Schumer said he asked himself. “We only had one thing as leverage at that point, which was the debt ceiling.” That leverage paid off. Last week, Trump stunned Republicans by accepting a deal with Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to raise the debt ceiling, finance the government through mid-December and fund aid for Hurricane Harvey victims just hours after House Speaker MORE (R-Wis.) said that such a deal was impossible. “We’ve got all this devastation in Texas; we’ve got another unprecedented hurricane about to hit Florida. And [Democrats] want to play politics with the debt ceiling?” Ryan said earlier in the day. “I think that’s ridiculous and disgraceful that they want to play politics with the debt ceiling at this moment when we have fellow citizens in need, [so we can] respond to these hurricanes so that we don’t strand them.” “The one thing we have is we’re New Yorkers,” Schumer said. “We’re pretty direct, and we talk right at each other.” “I said to President-ele... Link to the full article to read more