Trump Taunts Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries With 2028 Hats

President Donald Trump used his merchandise to mock Democratic leaders during a meeting while pretending he was working to avert a government shutdown.

The president shared multiple photographs on Truth Social Wednesday of his meeting the day before with House House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to Truth Social, showing two bright red “Trump 2028” hats sitting on the Resolute Desk.

Speaking to CNN’s Abby Phillip Tuesday night, Jeffries said the president hadn’t tried to hand out his merch, suggesting that they “just randomly appeared in the middle of the meeting.”

“It was the strangest thing ever,” Jeffries said. “And I just looked at the hat, looked at JD Vance who was seated to my left, and said, ‘Don’t you got a problem with this?’ And he said, ‘No comment.’ And that was the end of it.”

It’s possible Trump thought he could win the Democrats over with free hats. In an effort to pass his behemoth budget bill in August, Trump had invited Republican holdouts to meet with him personally in the Oval Office, and they left with signed merchandise, photos with the president, and a new attitude.

But this time, it doesn’t seem that Trump was using his merchandise as part of a charm offensive. More likely, he wanted the meeting to serve as an unwitting photo op to create visuals highlighting the futility of negotiating with a president and a party intent on being in power for the next five years. The Democrats left with nothing to show for it.

Vance also mocked the Democrats over the hats’ presence, saying Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends he thought the hats “made the … minority leader in both the House and Senate very uncomfortable.”

For his part, Vance has expressed no displeasure with Trump’s threats to defy the Twenty-Second Amendment, curb-stomping his own potential run. The president’s fundraising efforts have kicked 5 percent of donations to the vice president’s PAC, so maybe Trump’s number two is not too bothered by hat sales.

It would be a mistake to think that Trump ever took the prompt of working with Democrats seriously. The 79-year-old had already shared an AI video falsely depicting Schumer criticizing the Democrats’ “woke trans bullshit” next to a silent Jeffries in a superimposed Mexican sombrero with a curled mustache. Trump posted a similar video again Tuesday.

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.”