Mike Johnson Wishes Trump Were King While Shutdown Drags On

The speaker of the House is apparently in favor of totalitarian rule, so long as Donald Trump is in charge.

The government has been shut down for more than 27 days now. But instead of working to bridge the partisan gulf and restore critical social services to millions of Americans and paychecks to thousands of federal workers, House Speaker Mike Johnson is still hyperfixated on the nationwide No Kings protest that occurred two weekends ago.

Delivering what he clearly believed was a very clever “gotcha,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday that the country would be better off if Trump were king.

“They had a rally a couple weeks ago, they tried to portray President Trump as a king. We pointed out again, the obvious truth, that if Trump was a king then the government would be open,” Johnson smirked. “He’s been trying to do that.”

Johnson then appealed to low-income Americans with his pro-monarchy pitch, arguing that if Trump had singular authority, then he would have already advanced funding for SNAP benefits, which are set to expire November 1. (A coalition of 22 states sued the Trump administration Tuesday for allegedly withholding federal funds set aside specifically to continue the program through the month of November.)

The lower chamber leader has been complaining about the No Kings protests since before they even took place on October 18, trying every which way to leverage the movement to redirect attention away from his failures at the dais. He has falsely claimed that the peaceful, anti-authoritarian protest series—which produced the largest single-day protest in U.S. history—was actually advocating for violence against political officials.

By and large, the multi-month protest series has advocated for Americans’ First Amendment rights and rejected Trump’s agenda. Signage related to the event has emphasized the fight for democracy and against dictatorships. In the same political vein, No Kings participants have used their enormous visual footprint to fight against Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s unchecked authority, turn out for universal health care, condemn the release of disgraced former Representative George Santos, and raise national awareness on the rise of American fascism.

Meanwhile, Johnson appears to be doing everything in his power to keep the government closed. Week after week, he has sent representatives home instead of bringing them in to try to come up with a solution to the shutdown. When asked Wednesday if he would bring lawmakers back to negotiate government funding past November 1, he described doing so as a “futile exercise.” He then blamed Democrats for refusing to pass a continuing resolution that would strip health care away from millions of Americans.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pretending that he’s never even heard about an ICE agent firing at a faith leader’s face—even though he was first asked about it two weeks ago.

During a press conference Wednesday, Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins asked Johnson whether an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting a pepper ball at a Presbyterian minister outside an ICE facility in Chicago had infringed on the faith leader’s freedom of religion.

“I can’t comment on any of those instances. I haven’t seen or heard any of those videos,” Johnson replied.

But the House speaker had already used that line earlier this month. “I’ve not seen [ICE] cross the line yet,” Johnson said when he was first asked about the widely publicized incident.

Jenkins immediately caught the lie Wednesday. “I asked this question, and you’ll hear me say ‘yes you have’ here—because Johnson was already *directly asked* about one of these instances in one of earlier shutdown press conferences,” he wrote on X.

It’s not clear what’s worse: the idea that Johnson would hear a report about the use of excessive force against a faith leader and never think about it again—or that he actually expects Americans to believe he never heard about it in the first place.

But Johnson wasn’t done. For a guy who won’t comment on a video he claims not to have seen, the Louisiana Republican sure said a lot.

“Religious freedom does not extend and give you the right to get in the face of an ICE officer and assault them, if indeed that was what happened there,” Johnson continued Wednesday.

Crucially, video of the incident shows that the agent was standing on the facility’s roof firing at a clearly unarmed priest standing on the ground. But Johnson is so adamant about the alleged abuse of law enforcement by radical activists that he’s willing to take some creative liberties.

In his daily propaganda press conferences, the House speaker has embraced a sort of strategic blindness when it comes to the misdeeds of Donald Trump’s administration. Johnson even played dumb when asked about a report that ICE had detained scores of U.S. citizens, including children.

President Donald Trump has cleared the way for his multiple large-scale construction projects by demolishing the commission that would oversee them.

All six members of the Commission on Fine Arts received an email from the White House presidential personnel office Tuesday night notifying them that they had been terminated, effective immediately, The Washington Post reported.

An official told the Post that Trump planned to replace the members. “We are preparing to appoint a new slate of members to the commission that are more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” they said.

The official’s statement seems to suggest that Trump is seeking a slate of MAGA commissioners to green-light his every whim, as he attempts to unilaterally transform the nation’s capital into a shrine to his own triumph. The previous commissioners had been appointed to four-year terms by President Joe Biden.

The commission was established by Congress in 1910 to advise the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, including major projects at the White House. It’s not clear whether Trump intends to run his plans for a $300 million ballroom or his ridiculous “Arc de Trump” monument past the new commission.

The latest shake-ups come as Trump lays waste to the White House’s East Wing, after promising his grand designs for a space to host diplomats would leave the original building untouched.

It also seems that Trump has allowed his “builder in chief” status to eclipse his actual duties. The president has reportedly become consumed by his large-scale remodeling at the White House, wandering away from his work to survey renovations.

Donald Trump’s updated strategy toward crime in the United States: doing whatever he wants.

The non-monarch told U.S. troops stationed in Japan Tuesday that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his immigration agenda—a threat that could apparently involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to South Korea hours later, Trump clarified that he would do whatever is “necessary” to tackle crime, even if that meant ordering the U.S. military onto American soil.

“I would do that if it was necessary, if it was necessary I’d do that, but it hasn’t been necessary,” Trump said on the plane. “We’re doing a great job without that—is necessary. As you know, I’m allowed to do that.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want, but we haven’t chosen to do that,” he continued. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The president is typically prohibited from leveraging the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes under the Posse Comitatus Act, though one law stands as the major exception to that rule. Trump could use troops to handle domestic issues if he invoked the Insurrection Act, but doing so would require a state of emergency.

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to access the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities.

One such area the president has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

Other crime stats that have informed his decision to federalize the law enforcement of American cities were completely imagined. When Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed the city’s rising crime data—from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by Trump’s own FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

A month before the presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice referred to the Posse Comitatus Act as “too flimsy a guardrail” to genuinely protect the nation from a Trump White House, explaining that the principle within the act is protected “more by norms and historical practice” than the law itself. “Unfortunately, we’ve entered an era in which we can no longer rely on tradition to constrain executive action,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote at the time.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though it has picked up steam since his inauguration.

A doctor who played a crucial role in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brash decision to cancel millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine funding was fired this weekend from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill claims that his ouster as a senior adviser is part of a “coup” against Kennedy, adding that he believes that he is the first duck to fall as part of a “coup to overthrow Mr. Kennedy” led by the secretary’s current chief of staff, Matt Buckham. Hatfill hasn’t provided any evidence of a coup outside of his contentious ouster, and HHS dismisses his claims.

Hatfill’s hardcore MAHA alignment makes his ouster from RFK Jr.’s staff somewhat of a surprise. A department official told The New York Times that he was asked to resign for wrongly referring to himself as a chief medical officer and “not coordinating policy-making with leadership.” When he refused to resign, he was fired.

“Firing a staff member for cause does not add up to a coup,” the department official told the Times.

Hatfill, a bioweapons expert skeptical of Covid-19 vaccines, told Steve Bannon in an August interview that “it was more dangerous to take a vaccine than it was to contract Covid-19 and be hospitalized with it.” Hatfill also touted the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment option for Covid-19 despite Food and Drug Administration warnings against it.

The MAGA-led legal effort to punish New York Attorney General Letitia James has another glaring hole.

The fragile mortgage fraud indictment against James accuses her of lying about her financial situation in order to get a better loan rate when she purchased a home in Virginia in 2023. Prosecutors’ main gotcha accuses James of violating that loan agreement by renting the property out.

Except she actually was allowed to rent it out, according to legal and real estate experts that spoke Wednesday with Politico, which noted that “the key language in the contract expressly allows renting under certain conditions.”

James is charged with two counts of financial fraud in connection to the Norfolk home. She pleaded not guilty Friday to the federal charges.

The case has been fraught from the beginning: The last attorney tasked with leading the legal effort against James was given the boot in September after his team was unable to find incriminating evidence that she had knowingly committed fraud.

New York’s top cop has become one of Donald Trump’s chief legal adversaries since she bested him in his bank fraud case in 2024. Trump’s revenge began to take form in April, when his administration launched an investigation into James’s personal finances, accusing her of lying on her bank statements in order to obtain better mortgage rates.

At the time, Trump referred to her as a “totally corrupt politician,” a “wacky crook,” and accused James—the first woman of color to hold statewide office in New York—of being “racist.”

James has since been a star against Trump’s political retribution tour, as she has repeatedly promised to hold him to account, regardless of his presidential status. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, James has filed dozens of lawsuits against his administration. They range from legal rejections of Trump’s tariffs to fighting his “big, beautiful” budget’s attempt to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics.

It looks like President Donald Trump forgot about Armenia … again.

Speaking at a CEO lunch Tuesday night during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, Trump touted his efforts as a peacemaker, but didn’t appear to remember whom he’d actually brokered peace deals with.

“We saved millions and millions of lives with all of them. Azerbaijan … if you look at, if you look at.... Just take a look at that one. That was going on for, I think, 38 years,” Trump said.

“The two countries came in, and they were in the White House and they started off here, and they got closer and closer and closer,” Trump said, holding his fists out, before inching them back together.

“After an hour they were hugging each other and peace—it was amazing actually, it was beautiful to see,” he added.

This is at least the fourth time the 79-year-old has appeared to forget Armenia’s name.

During a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month, Trump repeatedly confused Armenia and Albania when speaking about the peace deal, and was subsequently mocked by world leaders. He had already made the same mistake while speaking on Fox News just a week before, and a conservative radio show the previous month.

The president also claimed Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin, the local autocrat who had been involved in prior ceasefire agreements, had lauded Trump’s efforts in ending the conflict.

You should take the Trump administration’s most recent immigration numbers with a grain of salt. 

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had deported more than 527,000 people as of Monday, and an additional 1.6 million people had voluntarily self-deported. DHS declared it was a “record-breaking” statistic.   

“This is just the beginning. President Trump and Secretary Noem have jumpstarted an agency that was hamstrung and barred from doing its job for the last four years,” a statement from DHS read. “In the face of a historic number of injunctions from activist judges and threats to law enforcement, DHS, ICE and CBP, have not just closed the border, but made historic strides to carry out President Trump’s promise of arresting and deporting illegal aliens who have invaded our country.”

But this number is unverifiable, and almost certainly inaccurate, given that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not updated its arrest statistics since January. 

“Has DHS ‘deported’ or ‘removed’ 527,000 ‘illegal aliens’? No. Definitely not. How do we know this, even though DHS has STOPPED publishing the underlying data which would let us verify it (see below)?” wrote Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “There are two main sources of removals/deportations: those carried out by @ICEgov and those carried out by @CBP (usually Border Patrol). As of 8/28/25, ICE had recorded just under 200,000 deportations. By the end of October, that figure is probably closer to 260,000.” 

As Reichlin-Melnick noted, DHS is likely claiming the much higher figure of 527,000  by including people who were turned away at ports of entry for paperwork and visa issues—which is not a deportation. An estimated 147,961 people were turned away in this manner from February to September. 

“The 527,000 figure (which again CANNOT be verified since DHS stopped publishing granular data) is likely only about 50-60% actual ‘deportations,’ not all of which are of ‘illegal aliens,’ and the rest is mostly people with VISAS turned away at ports of entry,” Reichlin-Melnick concluded. 

This posturing from the Trump administration comes as DHS plans to replace multiple ICE agents with Border Patrol agents in an effort to crack down even more brutally in its deportation campaign. Its aggression, desperation, and lack of transparency is what produces violence, not the immigrants it’s going after indiscriminately. 

The Trump administration can’t fire federal workers while the government is shut down, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Tuesday afternoon. 

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s ruling grants a preliminary injunction preventing firings while a lawsuit challenging their legality continues, and indefinitely extends an earlier temporary restraining order that would have expired Wednesday. Labor unions representing federal workers, including the American Federation of Government Employees, have sued to block President Trump’s mass layoffs, calling them an abuse of power. 

Illston’s ruling does not bode well for the White House. The judge, appointed by President Clinton, has said she believes the evidence will demonstrate the illegality of the mass firings. In hearings earlier this month, Illson said that layoff notices sent out by the government on October 10 appeared to be politically motivated and ill thought out. 

So far, about 4,100 layoff notices have gone out to federal employees, some arriving in inboxes that workers aren’t legally allowed to check. Meanwhile, the government shutdown is entering its fifth week, with House Speaker Mike Johnson refusing to bring Congress back into session and SNAP benefits set to expire within days. 

Democrats are refusing to vote on a funding bill that leaves out extending health care subsidies, a sticking point from which Republicans are refusing to budge. Republicans are not offering a health care plan of their own, either. Federal workers may have a momentary reprieve, but the shutdown is still continuing with no new developments.  

This story has been updated.

Nearly two dozen states are suing the Trump administration for failing to salvage SNAP benefits amid the ongoing government shutdown.

Approximately 42 million Americans—about one in eight people—who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program stand to go hungry after November 1, when benefits are scheduled to expire.

“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” reads a message explicitly blaming Democrats on the Department of Agriculture’s website.

Two options remain to save the critical welfare program: a quick (if unlikely and, apparently, politically undesirable) resolution to the gridlock in Congress or a chunk of change to keep the program chugging along until the next month.

A coalition of 23 attorneys general and three governors are fighting for the latter. They argue that the USDA not only has the funds to continue feeding Americans via SNAP through the month of November, it also has “both the authority and legal duty” to do so.

“Let’s be clear about what’s happening: For the first time ever, SNAP benefits will not be available to the millions of low-income individuals who depend on them to put food on the table,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, one of four attorneys general co-leading the lawsuit. “With the holidays around the corner, we are seeing costs for groceries continue to increase and food banks facing unprecedented demand. We are taking a stand because families will experience hunger and malnutrition if the Trump Administration gets its way.”

The agency held roughly $6 billion in contingency funds as of September 30, according to a USDA Lapse of Funding Plan that acknowledged Congress’s intent to keep SNAP benefits fully operational through the government shutdown. Days later, USDA officials directed states to put an indefinite hold on the rollout of November benefits as the federal branch researched the potential reality of distributing its emergency funds.

When states demanded an answer following weeks of silence, the USDA announced that it would be suspending SNAP benefits indefinitely. In a separate memo, USDA officials reversed course on their Lapse of Funding Plan, claiming that they actually were not authorized to use the $6 billion contingency fund to provide SNAP benefits, lest the agency need the cash to tackle a major natural disaster such as a hurricane or a tornado.

The government has been shut down for more than 27 days as of Tuesday, making it the second-longest federal closure in U.S. history. It’s only bested by a 35-day shutdown between 2018 and 2019 that occurred during Donald Trump’s first term.