WASHINGTON—Declaring that they were closer than ever to reaching a mutually satisfying result, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced Friday a meeting to put the finishing touches on a 1,000-piece ‘Starry Night’ jigsaw puzzle. “We are pleased that, after months of tense negotiations, we’re on the verge finishing this terrific puzzle of one of Van Gogh’s most critically important works,” said Mnuchin and Pelosi in a joint statement, adding that they had made a major breakthrough in assembling the pieces of the village and hoped the finished puzzle would reflect the enormous amount of work put into it by dozens of members of the Trump administration and Democratic House leadership. “We really want to get his puzzle done before the election, but it’s also important not to rush things and jam pieces of the night sky together that don’t actually fit. It’s true that we hoped to get the puzzle done faster when we started in June, but even working on it day and night, it takes time to assemble so many pieces. There are still some sticking points, like whether a few of the border pieces are lost for good or whether they’re just in a couch cushion somewhere in the Oval Office, but as soon as we find those and finish the cypress tree, we’ll be all ready to present it to the public.” Pelosi and Mnuchin admitted that it still might be hard to reach an agreement with Senate Republicans, who so far had rejected the offers of doing a puzzle entirely and seemed unlikely to agree to anything except a game of Risk.