Mike Johnson Snaps as Shutdown Arguments Repeatedly Crumble on Air

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Wednesday as reporters fact-checked his claim that Democrats had shut down the government because they wanted to lavish undocumented immigrants with free health care.

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Johnson was brutally fact-checked on his outlandish claims about the Democratic proposal to extend tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that were set to expire at the end of the year. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for those tax credits, and an estimated 5.1 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2034 if ACA funding expires at the end of the year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“The Democratic proposal is designed to prevent millions of Americans from losing their health insurance, losing Medicaid coverage, or paying higher health care premiums. Why are you against that?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“That’s an absurd statement, what you said there,” Johnson said.

“It’s a factual statement,” Stephanopoulos replied.

Johnson insisted his effort to pass a clean continuing resolution had been thwarted by Democrats. “The Democrats said instead that they wanted to give health care to illegal aliens instead of keeping critical services provided by the American citizens,” Johnson said.

The speaker didn’t fare any better Tuesday night. While speaking to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Johnson accused the Democrats of shuttering the government “because we won’t agree to restore health care to illegal aliens.”

But Collins knew that wasn’t what they were asking for.

“As you know, people who are here in the United States illegally have never been eligible for the Obamacare subsidies, for Medicare, for Medicaid,” she pressed. “So, what exactly are you saying that they’re trying to do when you talk about giving free health care to them?”

Johnson dodged the question, claiming that many people who were ineligible for Medicaid were receiving benefits, and that in Democrats’ counterproposal, taxpayer money would go toward benefits for undocumented immigrants.

Collins pointed out that this was impossible. “It’s against federal law for people who are here illegally to get health care,” she said.

“Yes! Yes, that’s why our reforms are so important, to enforce all that,” Johnson said.

“But I didn’t see that in the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally should get health care—” Collins pushed back.

“Nope, because they don’t have the level of specification that we have in our bill, that will unbind that, all those things that the CBO just verified, will be reversed,” Johnson said. “Can’t afford to do that.”

“But you see my point—” Collins said.

“No, I don’t see your point,” Johnson said. “No, that is a red herring.”

In fact, it was Johnson who decided to keep the House out of session Tuesday as the government shutdown loomed.

Earlier Tuesday night, Johnson tried the same line on Fox News, claiming that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “wants to give free health care to illegal immigrants.”

“But he says that’s not true,” said Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “Democrats say that it’s expanding Medicaid, getting dollars back for Medicaid, and it leaves some room for unauthorized immigrants.”

“Wrong,” Johnson said. “Read his own legislation.”

The House speaker claimed that undoing Republicans’ health care reforms would keep some undocumented immigrants on federal health insurance.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz thinks we need to “stop attacking pedophiles.”

The Texas senator made the brutal (potentially) Freudian slip during a Senate hearing about crime on Tuesday.

“Senator Booker also said we should have bipartisan agreement. I think that’s a great idea, we should have bipartisan agreement,” Cruz said. “How ’bout we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop murders?’ How ’bout we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop rapes?’ How ’bout we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop attacking pedophiles?’”

Cruz didn’t even stop to correct himself. He immediately started to push the narrative that the National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C., virtually stopped crime.

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Many were quick to point out the irony in Cruz’s statement, as he truly has been protecting pedophiles. The senator, along with almost all of the Republican Party save for Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have actively opposed measures that would release files on Jeffrey Epstein—offering posthumous protection to the serial sexual abuser and his wealthy friends (like President Trump).

“These people are so deep in their culture wars they can’t even string a sentence together without accidentally showing you where their minds are,” one X user wrote. “And somehow this is who’s writing our laws.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced hundreds of America’s top military commanders to attend an in-person assembly at Quantico, but practically no one was impressed with its messaging.

Over the course of 45 minutes, Hegseth railed against “woke ideology,” transgender people in the military, and “beardos,” and announced changing fitness standards that will effectively push women out of combat roles. But most of that was the same rhetoric that Hegseth has been spewing since he was floated as the Pentagon chief in December.

That left military officials in “disbelief,” frustrated and disturbed that they were ordered to Virginia with little notice, leaving their posts around the globe in order to accommodate Hegseth’s ego.

“I have yet to find a single military official who was in the audience today who thought that this was a good presentation,” New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper told MSNBC on Tuesday.

The meeting could have been boiled down to an email, per Cooper, who underscored that Hegseth’s intense MAGA messaging was not received particularly well by a military that is “supposed to present itself as nonpartisan.”

“All I’ve had from them so far, from the people I’ve talked to, is a combination of disbelief that some of them were made to fly from, some of them, Asia, from all over the world,” she continued, “all the way to Quantico to listen to the same familiar type of culture war complaints that we’ve been having since [Donald] Trump was reelected.”

Trump addressed the crowd after Hegseth, but his words weren’t received much better, according to Cooper, who referred to the president’s address as a “campaign-style stump speech.”

Trump was notably unimpressed with the commanders’ quiet reception to his remarks, at one point pulling a Jeb Bush by telling the crowd that they should applaud him.

“So you didn’t hear the kind of cheering that we usually get, because President Trump is used to playing for the type of crowds that favor him,” Cooper said. “And so he’s not very used to performing in front of an audience that’s just giving, looking back stone-faced. But that’s what you were getting from these generals.”

President Trump’s strange obsession with Barack Obama is still going strong.

Trump brought up the former president during his long-winded address to the military in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday.

“I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs. … I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that.… You walk nice and easy. You’re not, you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down,” he said, going on a random tangent about being afraid to slip and fall while walking down the steps of Air Force One.

“But don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president. “But he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen, da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop,” he continued, doing a short little song and dance onstage. “He’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on, I said it’s great, I don’t wanna do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.”

There’s no good explanation—other than the Obama obsession that Trump and other MAGA acolytes seem to have—that would explain why Trump felt the need to riff about that in front of a room full of the country’s highest-ranking military leaders. At least he can carry a tune.

The labor market continued to struggle in August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published on Tuesday. The hiring rate in August—or, the number of hires as a share of total employment—dipped slightly from the prior month, down to just 3.2 percent.

Barring June 2024 and the onset of pandemic shutdowns in April 2020, the last time the hiring rate was so dire was during the Great Recession era, when unemployment exceeded 7 percent, observed economist Heather Long, who wrote on X that the “anemic” figure shows the job market is “frozen.”

“Americans feel stuck,” Long said. “And it appears to be getting worse.”

The number of available jobs in August, 7.2 million, was relatively unchanged from the previous month.

Tuesday’s figures, published in the BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, may be the last data we get from the agency for some time, thanks to a looming government shutdown.

BLS is supposed to issue its August jobs report, or the Employment Situation Summary, on Friday, after a delay from last week due to a “data quality issue,” per Axios. But it will be delayed further if Congress does not reach a funding deal and the government accordingly shuts down, as is expected, at midnight.

The disruption would pose a problem for the Federal Reserve, policymakers, economists, businesses, and others who rely on the report for a comprehensive view of the economy.