On Day 3 of Shutdown, Trump Cuts Billions From Another Blue City

Russ Vought and the Trump administration’s shutdown revenge tour rolls on as they continue to make blue city residents suffer in an attempt to force Democrats to fold to their demands.

On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget director froze $2.1 billion in funding for Chicago infrastructure, blaming it on DEI and wokeness.

“$2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure projects—specifically the Red Line Extension and the Red and Purple Modernization Project—have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting,” Vought wrote Friday on X. “More info to come soon from USDOT.”

The Department of Transportation blamed it directly on the government shutdown.

“Unfortunately, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ decision to shut down the government has negatively affected the Department’s staffing resources for carrying out this important analysis,” the department said. “We urge Democrats in Congress to stop holding the federal government’s budget hostage so USDOT can get back to the important work of the American people.”

Chicago is just the latest Democratic city to get hit. The Trump administration has already frozen $18 billion in infrastructure projects in New Jersey and New York, and announced cuts to $8 billion in energy funding from 16 blue states, as well.

It’s clear that this is a sort of hostage situation for Democrats: Give Republicans the awful austerity bill they want, or more people and more transportation projects get hurt.

“The Democrats should know that they put the White House and the president in this position,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said plainly on Thursday. “And if they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It’s very simple: Pass the clean continuing resolution, and all of this goes away.”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker sounded off.

“At a time when federal agents are sowing chaos in Chicago, the Trump administration is holding bipartisan funding hostage,” he said on X. “It’s attempting to score political points but is instead hurting our economy and the hardworking people who rely on public transit to get to work or school.”

During Friday media appearances, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer tried to dance around questions about the weak labor market under President Donald Trump. But Fox News, of all outlets, wouldn’t let her get away with it.

Chavez-DeRemer told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that the shutdown sent “a momentum of jobs gains” to a “screeching halt.” The claim was too outrageous even for Bartiromo.

“Well, I mean, you know the data, though. You know where we are. I mean, we’ve had three months of slowing jobs,” the host observed, asking Chavez-DeRemer for a sense of the “jobs picture today.”

Chavez-DeRemer evaded, touting supposed investment, trade deals, and growth in gross domestic product under Trump, while expressing the importance of skilled workers. Finally getting around to the job numbers, she put it delicately: “So while we’ve seen the numbers kind of hold steady, the goal is to not stop the momentum.”

In reality, the jobs numbers haven’t been holding steady. Due to the government shutdown, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release its much-anticipated monthly jobs report for September on Friday, as planned. But other recent reports have been consistently disappointing.

This week, the BLS reported the worst hiring rate since June—and before that since before the pandemic and Great Recession era. Then the payroll-processing firm ADP found that the U.S. private sector lost jobs for the third time in four months, shedding 32,000 jobs in September.

In another media appearance later Friday morning, CNN’s John Berman didn’t let Chavez-DeRemer off the hook. When the labor secretary attributed poor job numbers to what the Trump administration “inherited from the Biden administration,” before lamenting that the ongoing shutdown slows the administration’s “momentum” to “grow those jobs numbers,” Berman challenged whether there is indeed any momentum.

“We have the strongest economy in the world,” Chavez-DeRemer insisted, leading Berman to cut in: “Jobs economy? Do we have the strongest jobs economy in the world? Do we have the strongest jobs economy compared to last year, when there were hundreds of thousands of jobs added each month?”

“Absolutely,” said Chavez-DeRemer, going on to blame the accuracy of BLS data—which recalls how Trump ousted the agency’s commissioner for a MAGA lackey following its abysmal July jobs report. “Because we saw those revisions under the Biden administration. That’s why this president has called on the modernization and streamlining of BLS to understand that we need modern information. We need to have accurate information.”

ICE may be watching your TikToks. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team in an effort to deport even more people. On Friday, Wired reported on planning documents showing that ICE is looking to hire 30 new private contractors to comb every major social media app to gain more info on where to stage their draconian, often violent raids.  

Targeted platforms will include X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit, but more niche sites could be on the list as well. The program will be run out of two sites, The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vermont, and the Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Santa Ana, California.

ICE—whose main surveillance database is made by data company Palantir and last year signed a $2 million contract with Israeli spyware company Paragon—may also use AI in its hunt, according to federal contracting records. 

This is far from ICE’s first time engaging in dystopian levels of surveillance. But this 24-hour AI surveillance, adding to already present privacy issues in America, only points to this kind of program being used on citizens and noncitizens alike. 

Read more at Wired.

A third of the White House complex has been furloughed so far due to the government shutdown—but exactly whom the Trump administration has deemed mission critical provides a clearer picture on their near-term agenda.

All 45 staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, for instance, were apparently too valuable to lose, as the agency was completely unscathed by the temporary employment suspension, according to a numerical breakdown of the furloughs obtained by Politico.

The Office of Management and Budget also escaped largely unscathed, maintaining 437 of its 530 employees.

The document obtained by Politico indicates DOGE’s workers and 49 employees at OMB are “exempt from the shutdown because their compensation comes from a source other than annual appropriations,” according to Politico.

Both departments gained fame earlier this year when their joint work supported a mass reorganization of federal employees, nixing thousands of civil servants from their roles across the executive branch.

Practically every other department in the White House complex will fare much worse, with some losing more than half of their staffers, according to the document.

The shutdown-induced damage has been seismic across the executive branch. So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Forty-five percent of the civilian work force of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

The president has been crystal clear in blaming Democrats for the critical congressional failure this week, publicly promising to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing. On Tuesday, the Trump administration issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act.

As federal agencies trumpet blatantly political messages blaming the “radical left” for the current government shutdown, FBI Director Kash Patel had a trainee fired for simply putting a gay pride flag on their desk.

In a letter dated Wednesday, Patel cited President Donald Trump’s Article 2 power to dismiss a trainee who the director said had “exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage” while working in Los Angeles, where the trainee had been assigned during the Biden administration.

Although the letter did not cite a specific infraction, three people familiar with the incident told MSNBC the trainee was fired for displaying a pride flag on their desk.

Under previous administrations, displaying a pride flag at one’s desk would not violate any FBI policy, two bureau veterans told CNN. But since entering office, Trump has taken significant efforts to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and to make it easier to discriminate in the workplace—summoning a flurry of lawsuits.

And federal employees have responded in kind. One person told MSNBC that FBI agents had warned colleagues after Trump entered office that the president’s loyalists in the bureau were searching through internal files for lists of LGBTQ employees. Even before Trump’s inauguration, agents and prosecutors warned one another to be careful about revealing their sexual orientation or support for the LGBTQ+ community to their new superiors.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that he had “no problem” with banning the progressive pride flag, which includes the colors of the transgender flag, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend claimed that “a lot of people are very threatened” by it. Wednesday’s firing comes as members of the Trump administration escalate rhetoric baselessly linking the transgender community to political violence, including a campaign for the FBI to adopt a new designation of “transgender ideology-inspired violence and extremism.”

Lawyer Alejandra Caraballo recently warned that under Trump, anything “as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”

The Trump administration’s projected strength during the government shutdown is belied by a nagging insecurity, reports The Wall Street Journal: that the Democratic health care concerns that set off the affair are well founded.

The government shut down this week after the GOP refused several Democratic demands, chief among them extending Affordable Care Act premium subsidies currently on track to expire at the end of 2025. Without the subsidies, millions of Americans, many in red-leaning states, would see their health care premiums more than double—initiating a political nightmare for a party hoping to cling onto its weak majority in the House in 2026.

The White House is keenly aware of this. Citing administration officials, the Journal reports that Trump’s advisers are concerned the GOP “will take the blame for allowing healthcare subsidies to expire,” and have “privately acknowledged” that the issue could cause Trump “political headaches.”

White House officials are thus considering proposals to extend the subsidies, according to the Journal, but the president remains undecided on supporting such a plan.

Republican strategists have long warned that the expiration of the subsidies would be a political disaster, with Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio issuing a memo in July that stated: “By broad bipartisan margins, voters want to see the tax credits extended rather than expire at the end of the year, whether in the context of premiums doubling or 5 million families losing their health insurance,” and “this includes solid majorities of Trump voters and swing voters.”

Nonetheless, Trump and his team are reportedly intent on standing strong and refusing to “cave to Democrats’ demands and negotiate while the government is shut down.” The White House, the Journal reports, still believes it has “the upper hand” in the ongoing shutdown.

But beyond the looming health care issue, early polling indicates that—despite the Trump administration’s sombrero memes and legally dubious use of federal agencies’ websites to villanize “radical left” Democrats—Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown.

Even a government bailout won’t undo the damage that Donald Trump’s tariffs have wreaked on America’s soybean farmers.

The president reiterated Wednesday that he intended to use the country’s supposed tariff money to subsidize American soybean farmers. Trump initially suggested the same idea last week, though he mixed up “billions” and “millions” in recounting how much money would amount to actual aid.

But speaking with CNN Thursday, American Soybean Association President Caleb Ragland said that a bailout wouldn’t be the golden ticket that Trump has made it out to be, as American farmers still need a market to sell their products.

“Right now, our largest export market in China is a zero buyer,” Ragland said. “They buy as many soybeans as all of our other export markets combined. And right now, with them having not entered into purchase U.S. soybeans, it is hurting prices and it is causing lots of uncertainty as a whole.”

Soybeans are the largest agricultural product that is exported from the United States, with the most beans grown in Illinois. The U.S. has been the number one supplier of soybeans to China.

“Government payments and programs never make farmers’ bottom line whole. It will oftentimes serve as a Band-Aid on a wound,” Ragland, a soybean farmer himself, told CNN. “What we need is markets and opportunity so we can actually make a profit and recoup the large investment that farmers have made.”

The Trump administration appears fond of bailouts. The White House is currently working out the kinks in a multibillion-dollar lifeline to Argentina in an apparent effort to make that country great again too. But after widespread reporting that the South American nation had replaced the U.S. as China’s soybean supplier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the cash infusion had become a “credit swap line.”

Farmers may have avoided these difficult times altogether if Trump had never instituted his aggressive tariff plan to begin with. Tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing have practically halted trade with China, nixing a crucial market for American farmers.

Apple has taken down apps that alert people to the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in their area after pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The primary ICE tracking app, ICEBlock, was intended to “keep people safe” in the midst of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. But Bondi saw it differently, arguing that it placed already masked ICE officers in danger.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”

Now, thanks to Apple once again bowing down to the Trump administration, its users will have to resort to other measures if they want to know where ICE is or may be.

Tracking apps were blamed after last month’s attack on an ICE facility in Texas that killed two detainees. ICEBlock’s founder, Joshua Aaron, was unconvinced.

“You don’t need to use an app to tell you where an ICE agent is when you’re aiming at an ICE detention facility. Everybody knows that’s where ICE agents are,” he told the BBC.

President Donald Trump’s obsession with posting AI slop to mock House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has reached a new low.

Amid an ongoing government shutdown, Trump posted a computer-generated video on Truth Social Thursday night that showed him sitting across from Jeffries in the Oval Office, with two red “Trump 2028” hats sitting on the desk between them.

That initial image was from the president’s meeting with Democratic leaders earlier this week, in which Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had drawn a hard line over cutting funding for health care subsidies.

The new image Trump shared sprang to life as he tossed a third red hat onto Jeffries’s head, and then pointed and laughed like a petulant child. In the background, the Village People’s “YMCA” could be heard, a favorite of Trump’s.

The AI-generated video managed to evaporate any trace of nuance from the fruitless meeting that the president had transformed into a photo op to highlight his power, which he clearly views as limitless. Clearly, one cannot actually expect any good-faith negotiations from such a witless bully.

This week, Trump has been posting a storm of AI-generated videos to mock Jeffries, hounding him with racist memes and inspiring other Republicans to join in. Weirdly, Trump seems to have no problem posting AI deepfakes of himself—images of the president have a tendency to feel surreal, even when they’re legitimate—but in some cases, it appears that the commander in chief can’t tell the videos aren’t actually real until it’s too late.

You may recall the Nazi porn scandal that plagued the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina last September. For the second year in a row, the cooler months have ushered in a Republican Nazi porn scandal, this time beleaguering a candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia.

Republican nominee John Reid faces fresh scrutiny surrounding a Tumblr blog, allegedly linked to him, that contained pornographic content. Reid denies ownership of the profile, which has the same username as other social media accounts of his: “JRDeux.”

It was previously reported that “JRDeux” reposted users’ photos that, per The Washington Post, ranged “from explicit photos of male genitalia to images typical of a racy underwear ad.” When that news broke, Reid, who is gay, persisted with his campaign despite Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin urging him to drop out.

On Wednesday, American Journal News unearthed additional details about the “JRDeux” Tumblr profile. In October 2015, the blog reposted an image of “a male college student in underwear,” which was published by a Nazi fetish account with a racial slur in its username; it contained the phrase “obedient n—.”

The user described himself as a “subservient n— who knows his place in society” and who was seeking “superior white men” in the Washington, D.C., area. According to American Journal News, the Nazi fetish account also posted sexual images including swastikas and white supremacist slogans, but “JRDeux” only shared the one underwear post.

“JRDeux” also shared posts from an account called “slaveandy,” devoted to content about sexual slavery.

According to Reid, the whole story was concocted to smear his sexuality.

Virginia Democrats, however, are calling on Reid to suspend his campaign.

“The accounts that Reid appears to have promoted and engaged with are full of hateful, racist, bigoted imagery,” said Virginia Delegate Mike Jones. “John Reid’s track record shows he is comfortable with white supremacy. Now, it looks like he’s fine with it showing up on his social media feed.”

“The news of the racist, antisemitic online content linked to John Reid on a social media account is appalling and shameless,” said state Senator Adam Ebbin. “They reveal John Reid has a disturbing level of comfort with disgusting, dehumanizing ideologies.”

The scandal echoes that which dashed the 2024 gubernatorial campaign of former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Last year, CNN reported that an account linked to Robinson had boasted about being a “Black Nazi,” among other shocking posts, on a pornographic forum.