Mike Johnson Panics After Trump Official Calls Out GOP on Shutdown

At least one Trump administration official can see the forest for the trees when it comes to the reality of the government shutdown.

Much to the chagrin of Republican leadership, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins delivered a rare level-headed missive Friday for Americans struggling with expiring SNAP benefits.

“My message to America is first, the fact that your government is failing you right now,” Rollins told reporters. “That poverty is not red or blue, it is not a Democrat or Republican issue. Doesn’t matter who you voted for or even if you voted. That if you are in a position where you can’t feed your family, and you’re relying on that $187 dollars a month for an average family in the SNAP program, that we have failed you.”

But that was a politically unsavory appeal for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who immediately jumped into recovery mode, attempting to twist Rollins’s words to fit the party message.

“And it’s, um, clarified that when she says, ‘We have failed you,’ she means, ‘We the Democrats,’ OK?” Johnson said.

Rollins is no stranger to the conservative message—she has run conservative think tanks for decades. After Johnson’s quick spin, she then proceeded to refuse to commit to releasing SNAP funds if a judge ordered her to do so.

“We’re looking at all the options,” she told reporters.

The government has been shut down for more than 30 days as of Friday, 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.

After spending weeks singularly blaming Democrats for the stalemate, Trump ordered Republicans late Thursday to “INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION’” by axing the Senate filibuster. The directive adds monumental pressure on Republicans, who have long fought to maintain the filibuster—which grants enormous power to the Senate’s minority—as a trump card during times of Democratic legislative upheaval.

Meanwhile, thousands of federal workers have gone weeks without pay, Affordable Care Act marketplace credits have lapsed in several states, and some 42 million Americans stand to go hungry when SNAP benefits expire on Saturday.

Donald Trump’s obsession with blowing stuff up is nothing new, according to his former staffers.

The president “fantasized quite openly” about detonating bombs during his first term, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff at the time.

“I will tell you very honestly, Trump, in the first term, at least when I was there, fantasized quite openly to advisers about wanting to blow up bombs,” Taylor told CNN Thursday. “It wasn’t more complicated than that, he didn’t have this 3D-chess strategy. He wanted to see bombs blown up.”

The president directed his administration Wednesday to resume nuclear weapons testing, in apparent violation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996. Russia—which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world—immediately reacted, warning that it “would follow suit” if the U.S. moves forward with the revised military policy.

Taylor recalled a distressed White House situation room meeting in 2017 during Trump’s game of brinksmanship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, after which top administration officials warned that the U.S. could enter war at any moment due to Trump’s flagrant tweets.

“Anyone who thought that there was some sophisticated strategy to try and intimidate Kim didn’t know the truth,” Taylor said. “Which was that, the president was freestyling. It was scaring his team. The secretary of defense walked out of one of those meetings and turned to us at the Department of Homeland Security and said, ‘I hope you are preparing for the United States to go to war.’”

Taylor drew national attention in 2018 when he anonymously penned an op-ed for The New York Times claiming to be part of the internal “resistance” against Trump’s agenda, lumping himself in with a group of senior officials who did not believe Trump was fit for the nation’s highest office. He has since written several books assessing Trump’s behavior in the White House that revealed intimate insider accounts.

Just 10 months into his second term, Trump has already illustrated a lackadaisical attitude toward unwarranted explosions. Earlier this month, Trump threw a parade in California to celebrate the Marine Corp’s 250th anniversary—a month before the actual anniversary date, and conveniently timed to coincide with the nationwide No Kings protests. The most controversial element of the plan, however, involved plans to shoot live ordnance over sections of Interstate 5 toward Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. During the display, shrapnel ended up hitting vehicles in Vice President JD Vance’s motorcade.

And during a trip to Japan earlier this week, Trump’s team pressured the Navy to launch 2,000-pound live bombs during a military demonstration, instead of dummy explosives. The Navy did use live bombs, although the White House later said that had always been the plan.

Elon Musk is set to cash in from Donald Trump’s bloated, unnecessary “Golden Dome” project.

The billionaire and fascism enthusiast’s company SpaceX is getting $2 billion in government funding to develop satellites able to track missiles and aircraft for the project, The Wall Street Journal reports. The funding was earmarked as part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in July, but a contractor was not specified at the time.

Trump has been pushing for the project throughout his second term, signing an executive order only days after being sworn into office to back up his campaign promise to build a missile defense system better than Israel’s “Iron Dome.” But when he unveiled the Golden Dome’s initial designs back in April, Trump dodged questions about whether military leaders even want such a system or think it is necessary (they don’t).

Plus, the dome may not even work, except to line Musk’s pockets even further. The tech oligarch’s companies already have a ton of government contracts (although his stocks took a massive hit, thanks to Department of Government Efficiency activities). And Trump has taken the hilarious approach of using the Golden Dome’s supposed appeal to try to convince Canada to become the fifty-first state, claiming it would reap its benefits for “ZERO DOLLARS” if it became part of the U.S.

Trump says that the Golden Dome would cost $175 billion, although analysts think it will cost much more than that. Meanwhile, the SNAP program is on the verge of expiring amid the government shutdown, and the impending end of health care subsidies stands to make medical care too expensive for millions of Americans.

GOP Representative Clay Higgins—who, like most congressmen, receives up to $79 per day in meal comps—thinks SNAP recipients should shut up, stop complaining, and stop smoking crack.

“There are 22 million American households receiving SNAP benefits for groceries, at $4200 per year on average. Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with $4200 dollars in properly shopped groceries,” Higgins wrote Thursday on X as thousands of Americans prepare to go without crucial SNAP benefits in the month of November thanks to the government shutdown. “Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars [sic] per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”

Higgins sounds like an extremely bitter, hateful, and out of touch piece of shit here, because he is. The average monthly SNAP benefit for households is about $356 per month, or a little more than 80 bucks a week. That is not some lavish gift to splurge, especially if you’re trying to feed multiple mouths in the midst of inflation and trade wars courtesy of President Donald Trump. Grocery prices have only gone up, even after Trump made promise after promise to make just the opposite happen, on the campaign trail. And on top of that, unemployment is going up while hiring slows down.

Trump’s own USDA stated that it costs about $1,000 a month to feed a family of four in this country. That is $250 per week. The average family receiving SNAP benefits is only receiving $80 per week. But here we have Higgins asserting that the people he and the rest of his party are ripping critical aid money from are only using it to buy crack anyway—a racially charged assumption reminiscent of Reagan-era “welfare queen” rhetoric. (And for the record, the majority of SNAP recipients are white.)

While not unsurprising from Higgins, this is still an appalling lack of basic empathy from someone who holds more power than anyone he’s voting to take food from. We can only hope their cruelty comes back to bite them in the midterms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal airstrike campaign targeting Latin American vessels allegedly linked to drug trafficking has led him to a new target: Venezuelan military sites.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that in weighing whether to expand the president’s military campaign to dry land, the Trump administration had identified the Venezuelan armed forces as a potential target, in what would be considered a major escalation into all-out war.

The Trump administration has alleged that the Latin American country’s cartels are being run by none other than Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken a central role in the Trump administration’s campaign to see Maduro out of power, claimed last week that there was “a narco-state in Venezuela run by a cartel,” and compared the government to Al Qaeda.

Last week, Trump stated his intention to expand his lawless strikes to dry land—bragging that Congress wouldn’t stop him. Trump also ordered America’s most advanced aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean in a major escalation of military tension between the U.S. and Venezuela.

Since the beginning of September, the U.S. has executed 14 military strikes on vessels and killed 61 people, according to The New York Times. Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs told CNN Thursday that Pentagon officials claimed they “do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”

Donald Trump has called for an end to the Senate filibuster, effectively ordering Republicans to not only defy the will of their base but also backtrack on long-standing party policy to end the congressional stalemate.

“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option—Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night.

The directive will add monumental pressure on the Senate to find a resolution to the funding blockade, but it’s not clear whether Republicans will bend.

Republican leaders have fought for years to maintain the Senate filibuster, a policy they view as particularly useful as it lends power to the minority party. The upper chamber filibuster requires a bill to gain more than 60 votes in order to advance, an act that rarely happens without bipartisan agreement. Those in favor of the filibuster have argued that the policy encourages compromise. But Republicans have a specific affinity for the unique power as they historically weaponize it to prevent Democrats from enacting sweeping legislative reforms.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune already signaled earlier this month that Republicans would not consider altering the rules to conclude the shutdown, referring to the filibuster as “something that’s been a bulwark against a lot of really bad things happening with the country.”

But with Republicans now controlling every branch of the federal government, Trump expects different results.

“Now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN,’” he continued on Truth Social. “If the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it.

“BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE STONE COLD ‘CRAZY,’ THE CHOICE IS CLEAR—INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump added in a separate post.

The government has been shut down for more than 30 days as of Friday, 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 Trump’s first term.

Four Republican senators were brave enough to join Democrats in a vote Thursday to end Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs. This was the Senate’s third vote this week to end Trump’s tariffs.

Senator Rand Paul, who served as the Republican sponsor for the resolution alongside Democrat Ron Wyden, and Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski joined the 51–47 vote to end Trump’s tariffs on more than 100 countries.

McConnell said in a statement earlier this week that “tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive.”

“The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule. And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise,” McConnell added, taking a shot at Trump’s meltdown over a Canadian ad of former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs. “This week, I will vote in favor of resolutions to end emergency tariff authorities.”

The one-page resolution the Senate passed on Thursday ends Trump’s national emergency declaration, which he announced on April 2 to start his global trade war. While this vote sends a message of bipartisan disapproval directly to Trump, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is likely to kill the resolution in the House.

The Trump administration has admitted that they are not trying to identify anyone aboard boats they accuse of sending drugs to the U.S. before bombing the vessels. 

Speaking to CNN Thursday, Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs said she was told in a Pentagon briefing “that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes” and that was part of the reason why the administration has not sought to detain or prosecute the survivors of the strikes, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

As far as the legal justification the White House is using to blow up boats in the waters surrounding Latin America, that information has only been available to select Republicans.

“There’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” Jacobs said, adding that she was told that the only drug targeted in the strikes so far was cocaine, which Pentagon officials called “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.” 

The U.S. has killed at least 61 people in more than a dozen airstrikes on boats in the western hemisphere that it claims are smuggling drugs and are part of “designated terrorist organizations.” The attacks have prompted criticism from countries in the region, including Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, and several of the people killed in the strikes have been identified as fishermen.  

Even some Republicans in Congress, such as Representative Mike Turner and Senator Rand Paul, have expressed misgivings about the strikes, with Paul calling them “extrajudicial killings.” Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be planning to go even further, with the president bragging that he wants to begin strikes on land and Hegseth moving 14 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet to the Caribbean Sea. It seems that a war has been declared in all but name. 

Vice President JD Vance appears to think that his wife is going to hell.

At a Turning Point USA town hall Wednesday at the University of Mississippi, in honor of the late right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, Vance was questioned about the contradictions between his public statements on race, immigration, and religion, and his personal relationship with his Hindu, Indian American wife, Usha Vance. “You are married to a woman who is not Christian.… She still calls herself Hindu. You are raising three kids in interracial, cultural, racial religious household. How are you maintaining, how are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion?” a young South Asian woman asked Vance.

“Yes, my wife did not grow up Christian, I think it’s fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family in either direction,” Vance replied, before stating that the two were both “agnostic or an atheist” when they met. “Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here. The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend and we talk to each other about this stuff. So we decided to raise our kids Christian.… That’s the way that we have come to our arrangement.”

The crowd erupted with applause.

“You just gotta talk to the person that God has put you with,” Vance continued, as his answer became more strange. “Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I’ve told her, and I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I do wish that. Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

Many rightfully saw this as Vance rejecting his wife’s own religion and culture.

“Watch as Vance denies his wife’s religious identity as Hindu. Instead, he labels her as currently without a religion and a future Christian,” South Asian history professor Dr. Audrey Trushcke wrote on X. “Folks, believe the far-right when they say Christian is the only legitimate religious identity. They mean it.”

“When JD Vance had hit his lowest, it was his ‘Hindu’ wife and her Hindu upbringing that had helped him navigate through the tough times,” Indian author Monica Verma wrote. “Today in a position of power, her religion has become a liability. What a fall. What an epic fall for the man.”

For the record, Usha Vance has described her Hindu upbringing as something that helped make her parents “good people.”

“I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people,” she said in an interview with Fox News last year.

“When you convert to Catholicism it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that,” she said in a more recent interview with Meghan McCain. “We had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that, when I’m not Catholic, and I’m not intending to convert or anything like that.… The kids know that I’m not Catholic, and they have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition from books that we give them, to things that we show them, to the recent trip to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit.”

This “arrangement” does not sound like a compromise, especially when Usha’s husband is proudly proclaiming that he hopes she’ll abandon the religion she grew up with.

Vance also faced questions by the same woman about his vehemently anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.

“You sold us a dream. You don’t owe us anything, we have worked hard for it. Then how can you as a vice president stand there and say that we have too many [immigrants] now, and we are going to take them out?”

“I’m talking about people who came in in violation of the laws of the United States of America, and I’m talking about, in the future, reducing the number [of immigrants].”

“You just said you are not stopping with the people who came here legally, right?” the woman replied. “But you are pushing out policies that hurt us. And these policies are not even solving the problems. These problems are just creating chaos.”

“I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future, while also respecting that there are people who have come here through lawful immigration patterns that have contributed to the country,” Vance said. “Just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean we are thereby committed to let in a million, or 10 million, or 100 million? … My job is not to look out for the interests of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted Thursday that feeding the hungry would mess up his political game.

CNN host Dana Bash asked Johnson why he wouldn’t consider moving money around to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which will stop receiving federal funds at the start of November. The House speaker accidentally revealed Republicans are using the program as leverage to end the government shutdown.

“Because if you deviate from the goal of reopening the entire government, Chuck Schumer and the radicals over there will continue to play games with people’s paychecks, their livelihoods,” Johnson said. “And if you do just part of this, it will reduce pressure for them to do all of it, to do their basic job, and that is reopen the government.”

It seems clear that Democrats aren’t the ones playing games with people’s livelihoods, but instead it is Republicans who are holding SNAP benefits hostage from 42 million Americans in order to make the opposition bend. And SNAP is a hostage Republicans are more than willing to kill—they’ve already voted to gut nearly $300 billion from the program through 2034.

Earlier Thursday, Johnson claimed that President Donald Trump had already done everything he could to mitigate the harm. But in fact, the Trump administration turned back on its own policy by claiming without precedent that it cannot legally use SNAP contingency funds to keep the essential program afloat during a government shutdown.

Instead, the Trump administration has set up a false dilemma, asserting that the government can’t continue to fund SNAP benefits without draining funds from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, which is currently being paid for by tariff money. Meanwhile, Trump had no problem moving funds to pay for military service members’ paychecks.