Mike Johnson Snaps When Shutdown Comments Thrown Back in His Face

Republicans are scrambling to downplay just how much enjoyment President Donald Trump is evidently extracting from preparations to fire federal workers by the thousands amid the government shutdown.

Speaking at a press conference Friday about Trump’s plans to make massive cuts to essential programs amid the government shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted that the president was “trolling” Democrats. But at the same time, Johnson claimed that Trump and White House Budget Director Russell Vought took “no pleasure” in making the cuts.

“Now, are they taking great pleasure in that? No. Is [Trump] trolling the Democrats? Yes. I mean, yes! Because that’s what President Trump does, and people are having fun with this,” Johnson said, likely referring to the trough of (often racist) AI slop the president has offered up to mock Democrats in the wake of the government shutdown.

Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram pressed the speaker on his claim. “Square something for me. How can you say, ‘They take no pleasure in this,’ and then the next minute say, ‘Oh, they’re just having fun and trolling people?’” he asked.

“So, the effects are very serious on real people, real Americans. We support federal employees who do a great job in all these different areas. But what they’re trying to have fun with, trying to make light of, is to point out the absurdity of the Democrats’ position,” Johnson said. “And they’re using memes and all the, you know, tools of social media to do that. Some people find that entertaining. But at the end of the day the decisions are hard ones, and I tell you they’re not taking any pleasure in that.”

Earlier this week, Johnson admitted that Trump’s posting was “not [his] style,” and seemed to agree with a Democratic colleague that the president had become “unhinged.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also struggled Friday to downplay how much fun Trump was having in the supposedly uncomfortable positions Democrats had put him in. “Democrats have given this administration an unenviable choice to have to take a look at the balance sheet and identify where these cuts and layoffs can be made,” Leavitt said.

ABC’s Mary Bruce hit back at Leavitt’s claim, pointing out that the president had described the shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to lay off additional federal workers, and gleefully posted a pathetic parody video to Truth Social comparing Vought to the Grim Reaper.

“So which is this,” Bruce asked. “Is this an opportunity to fire more workers, or an unfortunate consequence?”

“Look, the president likes to have a little fun every now and then, and I think both things can be true at the same time,” Leavitt replied. “The Democrats have given the administration this opportunity, and we don’t like laying people off, nobody takes joy in that around here. And if you think that, then I think that’s very sad, you view the White House and our staff as wanting to put people out of work. Nobody wants to do that, but sometimes in government you have to make tough decisions.”

Of course, the Democrats aren’t forcing Trump to lay off federal workers. In fact, during the last shutdown in 2018, under Trump’s first administration, he did not make sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.

This time around, he’s using funding to essential programs and agencies as a political lever to intimidate Democratic lawmakers, while manifesting Vought’s dreams of downsizing the government. It’s worth noting that Trump’s not the only one having fun: the Republican Party has made it clear they are fully on board with the racist memes.

MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec—who helped spread election fraud rumors in Pennsylvania in 2024—has been voting in Pennsylvania for nearly a decade while living in Maryland.

Slate has reported that Posobiec, also of “Pizzagate” fame, voted in Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2024. But when Posobiec resigned from his Navy Intelligence job and “remained” in Maryland in 2017, the same year his political influencing really started to take off, he continued to vote in Pennsylvania via absentee ballots and later in person. Posobiec used his parents’ Pennsylvania home address to vote in the crucial swing state in 2018, 2022, and 2024, all while evidence strongly suggests he lived in Maryland that entire period.

A 2017 divorce complaint from Posobiec’s ex-wife lists a Maryland apartment as his full-time address. Since then, he and his new wife have shared photos of a suburban home in Maryland, which he listed as his address on over a dozen political campaign contributions last year.

“SECURED THE BAG. Just stopped by the county voting board and did the deed—easy and even open on Sunday! Vote Early, Pennsylvania!” Posobiec posted last year.

The overcompensating didn’t stop there.

“Thousands of fraudulent registrations have already been reported in multiple counties across PA and we all saw Josh Shapiro sit silent as officers blocked people from early voting yesterday,” Posobiec wrote that same year.

While Posobiec is yet to be charged with a crime, these findings are yet another addition to the now long history of MAGA hypocrisy. Calling for witch hunts over fake voter fraud while potentially committing real voter fraud encapsulates the movement’s unseriousness.

Just before 8 a.m. on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was spotted with a film crew on the roof of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, where protesters on the street below were met with aggressive force throughout the morning.

The facility has become a flash point due to its use in the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz in Illinois.

“They’re committing crimes against humanity there,” Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic U.S. House candidate in Illinois told The New Republic last month, after she was thrown forcefully to the ground by an ICE agent at a protest outside the facility. In recent weeks, many Illinoisans protesting at the center have been tackled, dragged away, tear-gassed, and otherwise menaced by masked federal agents clad in tactical gear.

Social media footage from Friday shows heavily militarized federal law enforcement—including officers with numerous agencies, an armored vehicle, and snipers stationed on the roof—as well as violent skirmishes in which protesters were hauled off, with more than a dozen reported arrests.

Local and state law enforcement were also present, drawing criticism, though the police say they were “not assisting ICE with any detention operations,” per CBS News.

As protesters gathered below early Friday morning, Noem was videoed on the roof of the facility by an ABC7 Chicago helicopter. The homeland security secretary, whose staged photo ops have earned her such monikers as “Cosplay Kristi” and “ICE Barbie,” was surrounded by cameras and a production crew.

Joining Noem for the photo op was Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who eventually joined the scrum below, as journalist Taha Syed recorded him shouting at a protester before piling on top of him.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker decried Noem’s presence at the facility in a thread on X. “Federal agents reporting to Secretary Noem have spent weeks snatching up families, scaring law-abiding residents, violating due process rights, and even detaining U.S. citizens,” he wrote.

“Secretary Noem should no longer be able to step foot inside the State of Illinois without any form of public accountability,” Pritzker said, calling on her to hold a press conference. “Illinois is not a photo opportunity or warzone,” he added, “it’s a sovereign state where our people deserve rights, respect, and answers.”

President Donald Trump has offered a baffling legal justification for his extrajudicial military strikes on vessels the government claims are transporting drugs—and it’s a disturbing escalation of efforts to declare war against his enemies.

A confidential memo obtained by The Intercept that was sent to multiple congressional committees this week asserted that the president had sweeping discretion to order the executions of alleged drug smugglers because he had declared a state of “non-international armed conflict” against boats that are part of “designated terrorist organizations.”

But if the U.S. is at war, that’s for Congress to decide—not Trump—and the administration has offered no actual evidence to back up its claims that the vessels were linked to any drug cartel at all.

The memo claimed that Trump had the authority to determine cartels were “nonstate armed groups,” and that their transport of drugs constituted “an armed attack against the United States.”

To be considered a “non-international armed conflict,” a dispute must involve an organized nonstate party, or parties, and the violence between the parties must be “sufficiently intense,” according to the United Nations. Using this justification, Trump could potentially declare war against any group—real or imagined—that he wants.

Last month, the United States launched at least three deadly strikes on vessels, two of which were from Venezuela, that the government claimed were smuggling drugs. The Trump administration offered no legal justification for the initial strike, simply claiming the president had “absolute authority” to kill anyone he claimed was a drug trafficker. But that obviously wouldn’t stand up to legal scrutiny.

Trump officials tried shifting narratives, even claiming that the initial strike was an act of “self defense,” although the boat carrying 11 people had reportedly turned around by the time it was fired upon. After another strike, Trump claimed the victims were “confirmed narcoterrorists,” though the wife of one of the dead men claimed her husband was a fisherman. Certainly none of the men on board received a trial before Trump had them summarily executed.

Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, slammed Trump’s excuses in a statement to the Intercept.

“Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” said Reed. “But now, by the President’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled ‘unlawful combatants,’ and he has deployed thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft against them.

“Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public. Every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.”

Donald Trump’s latest attempts to broker peace between Israel and Palestine include the threat of even more violence against Gaza.

In a lengthy Truth Social post Friday, the U.S. president urged Gaza’s residents to evacuate before he “extinguished” Hamas, promising to allow “all HELL” to break loose on the group if they refuse the White House’s latest ceasefire arrangement.

“As retribution for the October 7th attack on civilization, more than 25,000 Hamas ‘soldiers’ have already been killed,” Trump wrote. “Most of the rest are surrounded and MILITARILY TRAPPED, just waiting for me to give the word, ‘GO,’ for their lives to be quickly extinguished. As for the rest, we know where and who you are, and you will be hunted down, and killed.

“I am asking that all innocent Palestinians immediately leave this area of potentially great future death for safer parts of Gaza,” he continued. “Everyone will be well cared for by those that are waiting to help. Fortunately for Hamas, however, they will be given one last chance!”

Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. After their joint meeting, the president announced that the conflict had effectively come to an end, claiming that it was a “historic day for peace” so long as Hamas accepted the terms of a hostage exchange—and embraced an indefinite Israeli occupation. A 20-point plan released by a White House social media account also outlined Trump’s intention to redevelop Gaza into a real estate investment paradise—and to personally head a “board of peace” overseeing the region.

“Great, powerful, and very rich Nations of the Middle East, and the surrounding areas beyond, together with the United States of America, have agreed, with Israel signing on, to PEACE, after 3000 years, in the Middle East,” Trump wrote. “THIS DEAL ALSO SPARES THE LIVES OF ALL REMAINING HAMAS FIGHTERS! The details of the document are known to the WORLD, and it is a great one for ALL! We will have PEACE in the Middle East one way or the other. The violence and bloodshed will stop.”

Trump demanded that Hamas leadership respond to the agreement by Sunday at 6 p.m. EST.

“Every Country has signed on! If this LAST CHANCE agreement is not reached, all HELL, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas,” Trump emphasized. “THERE WILL BE PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.”

Hamas was still weighing whether to accept the deal as of Thursday, reported PBS.

At least 49 Palestinians have been killed Friday alone by Israel and its ongoing starvation campaign, according to local medical sources that spoke with Al Jazeera. The war-sieged region has so far had 457 hunger-related deaths, including 152 children, since the October attack. The total death toll in Gaza since then has risen to 66,288 people with 169,165 individuals wounded, according to the Health Ministry.

Over nearly 24 months of fighting, Israel has cut off access to water, electricity, medical services, and food in the region, all under the banner of rooting out Hamas soldiers, forcing millions of people into mass suffering to satisfy its war. For decades, Israel has trimmed away and confiscated Palestinian land, claiming it for its own illegal settlements, thanks in large part to America’s financial support.

Last month, a United Nations commission determined that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

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.”