Here’s What Trump Was Up to While the Government Was Shutting Down

Donald Trump was very presidential about the government shutdown.

America’s social media–obsessed leader was busy posting racist, artificially generated cartoons as the clock ticked down Tuesday evening.

It’s the first government shutdown since late 2018, when the 116th Congress failed to come to an agreement on how to fund the country for 34 days under Trump’s first administration. But having experience with these sorts of things apparently doesn’t lend to improved leadership.

There were many things that Trump could have done before the government ran out of funding. For instance, Trump actually did have congressional leadership in the White House on Tuesday—but rather than leverage the weight of his office to mediate between the country’s diametrically opposed political parties, the president used House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for a “Trump 2028” photo shoot without their consent.

The 79-year-old had already used their images and voices without their consent on Monday to create an AI video falsely depicting Schumer claiming that “nobody likes Democrats anymore” because of the party’s “woke trans bullshit.” Beside him is a silent Jeffries in a superimposed Mexican sombrero with a curled mustache. Mariachi music plays in the background.

Tuesday night, just hours away from the shutdown, Trump shared a clip of Jeffries on MSNBC in which the New York politician called Trump’s AI gimmick a “disgusting video” laden with “bigotry.” But Trump’s post was, in itself, another AI-generated taunt: Halfway into the tape, a mariachi band composed of several Trumps appears in the background, and another sombrero and a mustache is placed on Jeffries’s face.

The Trump War Room X account also posted an AI-generated photo of Representative Maxine Waters with a sombrero and cartoonishly large mustache.

The extremely mature response to the shutdown definitely did not denigrate the office of the president at all. Meanwhile, thousands of federal employees are expected to be furloughed (Trump has threatened to fire them while they’re gone); federal services—including their websites—have ground to a halt; and the stock market is already slipping in reaction.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the same spending bills it failed to pass last night at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

In the latest sign that the labor market is experiencing a serious contraction, the U.S. private sector lost 32,000 jobs in September, according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday.

The loss, the worst figure reported by the payroll-processing company in two and a half years, was far below the 45,000-job increase that had been forecast by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.

ADP data from August was also revised, indicating that the economy actually shed 3,000 private-sector jobs, rather than gaining 54,000 as was previously reported.

That makes August and September the first consecutive negative months since Covid-19 was ravaging the economy. The ADP also reported losses in June, meaning it’s also the first time since the pandemic era when three of four consecutive months have seen losses. (In 2020, the private sector shed jobs each month from March to July.)

The worrying snapshot of Trump’s economy comes as this week’s government shutdown has cast the United States into a blackout of government economic data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was scheduled to deliver its much-anticipated monthly jobs report on Friday (after a delay from last week) but will not do so should the shutdown persist through the end of the week.

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.

Republicans are actively trying to delay the release of the Epstein files.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was joined by other GOP leadership Tuesday in rejecting bids to swear in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva.

Grijalva won the special election in Arizona last week to replace her father, Raul Grijalva, making her the first Latina the Grand Canyon State has sent to Congress. She’s also the last signature that the House needs on a petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files—but Republicans are dragging their feet.

Instead, party leadership is refusing to swear in Grijalva until Congress returns to its regular session on October 3. But that’s not at all how Republicans treated their own representative-elects earlier this year: Party members didn’t delay swearing in Florida Republicans during a pro forma session in April, the day after they won their special elections.

The House was supposed to be in session on Monday and Tuesday, but Republican leaders canceled those work days in an attempt to strong-arm Democrats into accepting another stopgap funding measure that would benefit Donald Trump’s agenda.

“There’s no reason why I couldn’t have been sworn in, and it’s very problematic, because we’re facing a government shutdown. We’re going to have constituents who have questions, and there is nobody there to answer questions,” Grijalva told The Hill.

She added that Johnson had not provided a timeline for her swearing-in ceremony, telling the publication, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Grijalva’s swearing in appears to be noise in the background for House leadership, which is currently scrambling to prevent a government shutdown that would begin Tuesday night. But there’s plenty of precedent for Grijalva to be sworn in, even in such complicated circumstances. For instance, the entire House was sworn in during a shutdown in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Grijalva had already vowed to sign the bipartisan petition advancing the immediate release of the Epstein files. Just four Republicans have penned their signatures on the petition, demanding more transparency from the Trump administration regarding the investigation into deceased pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.

President Donald Trump begged top military brass Tuesday to clap for him as he unleashed a radical far-right tirade about using the armed forces against American citizens.

“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump said. “This is very inter— don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud.

“And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course there goes your rank, there goes your future,” Trump added, as some laughter rippled throughout the room.

Despite the president’s pathetic plea, the U.S. military officials assembled by War Secretary Pete Hegseth to bear witness to this diatribe mostly sat in silence throughout the president’s remarks, in keeping with the military’s tradition of nonpartisanship, according to The Washington Post.

Top military leaders sat quietly while the president touted the creation of a quick-reaction force to use against protesters and ranted that America was “under invasion from within.”

“We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out,” Trump rambled.

House Democrats decried Republican leadership at a Tuesday protest against Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to keep the body out of session as a government shutdown looms.

Democratic lawmakers decided to show up en masse to a pro forma session of the House on Tuesday—which are typically brief with no business conducted—to display their dissatisfaction with their colleagues across the aisle.

Johnson had canceled votes on Monday and Tuesday, despite a shutdown deadline of midnight, in hopes of pressuring Senate Democrats into acceding to a Republican stopgap funding measure.

The move also postpones the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who is poised to provide the deciding signature on a petition that forces a floor vote on the release of the Epstein files. (Notably, Johnson has previously sworn in special election winners during pro forma sessions, but has opted not to do so with Grijalva.)

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro called the cancellations “shameful,” saying, “Speaker Johnson is silencing members and shutting down the House in advance of a government-wide shutdown.”

The Democrats used Tuesday’s session to try to force a vote on their own alternative stopgap—which would, among other provisions, reverse health care cuts in Trump’s tax and spending plan—as well as to demand that Grijalva be sworn in.

Many predicted the meeting to be quickly adjourned, with one House Democrat telling Axios, “You’re going to see that gavel go faster than the speed of light.”

And indeed, presiding Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, faced by a House floor packed with dozens of Democrats and few Republicans in sight, hastened to end the session, ignoring several shouts of “Speaker!” as Democrats sought to be recognized so DeLauro could introduce their funding measure.

As Griffith gaveled out, he was showered with objections. “Swear her in!” some members reportedly began to chant, referring to Grijalva. “Shame on you!” said others. “Do your job!”

According to CNN, some held signs depicting Johnson’s face, which read “missing person.”