Trump Proudly Announces His Shutdown Revenge on Democrats

Donald Trump could not be more plain: He is planning to use the government shutdown to take revenge against Democrats.

During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, the president announced that the White House would be cutting congressionally approved programs during the government closure—but only those supported by America’s liberal party.

“We’ll be making cuts that will be permanent, and we’re only going to cut Democrat programs, I hate to tell you,” Trump said. “I guess that makes sense, but we’re only cutting Democrat programs.

“We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly, that’s the way it works,” he continued. “They wanted to do this, so we’ll give them a little taste of their own medicine.”

For the record, that’s not how the government is supposed to work. The Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974 for exactly this purpose: to prevent the executive branch from withholding funds in a way that would undermine Congress’s “power of the purse.” Regardless of Trump’s bravado, a government shutdown doesn’t suddenly suspend the law.

It’s not the only law that the Trump administration has decided could be flouted. 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 workforce of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has insinuated that not every furloughed federal worker will be eligible for back pay, despite a bipartisan-supported 2019 law that mandates they are.

In other seismic executive oversteps, the White House has promised to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing and, last week, 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.

Justice Department lawyers reposting President Trump’s statements may have inadvertently endangered their prosecution of Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.

On September 18, Trump said in a Fox News interview that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.... He shot him right in the middle of the back — instantly dead.... This is a sickness. This really has to be studied and investigated.” All of what Trump said was only alleged. 

A clip of the interview was posted by conservative page Rapid Response 47. DOJ Public Affairs head Chad Gilmartin retweeted it, commenting that the president was “absolutely right,” violating the judge’s explicit orders that DOJ employees refrain from public comment about the  case. 

Mangione’s defense team promptly notified the court that they will be filing a motion to dismiss and a suppression motion on Friday. 

Federal prosecutors are defending Gilmartin’s actions, saying he and other department employees “operate entirely outside the scope of the prosecution team, possess no operational role in the investigative or prosecutorial functions of the Mangione matter, and are not ‘associated’ with this litigation,” according to the filing, as reported by NBC News. 

Mangione has pleaded not guilty, and already had charges of state terrorism dismissed in September. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia MAGA Republican, criticized Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday for delaying the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat.

Amid the ongoing government shutdown, Johnson has cancelled regular House sessions and held off on swearing in Grijalva—who was elected more than two weeks ago—during the brief pro forma sessions taking place in the meantime.

But since Johnson previously swore in GOP representatives during pro formas, Democrats are accusing the speaker of dragging his feet due to Grijalva’s stance on releasing all unclassified documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The Arizona Democrat would provide the deciding, 218th signature on a petition to force a House vote on the Epstein files’ release.

Johnson denies that the petition—currently signed by 213 Democrats, as well as Greene and three fellow Republicans—has anything to do with his reluctance vis-à-vis Grijalva.

“I can’t conclusively say if that’s why the House is not in session, but the House should be in session,” Greene told CNN on Thursday. “And the House should be in session for many reasons. We have appropriation bills that need to get passed. There is a new Democrat that’s been elected that does deserve to be sworn in. Her district elected her. We have other bills that we need to be passing.”

If Johnson is indeed just hoping to avoid the discharge petition, Greene said, “Why drag this out? That is going to have 218 signatures, and I say go ahead and do it, and get it over with.”

The Georgia Republican has proven very willing of late to defy her party’s leadership. Also during her CNN interview, for example, Greene said Johnson and the Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune “absolutely” deserve the blame for the shutdown. “We control the House, we control the Senate, we have the White House,” she added. “This doesn’t have to be a shutdown.”

Republicans are already working to downplay rural hospitals shutting down as a result of President Donald Trump’s behemoth budget reconciliation bill.

During an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday, Nebraska Representative Mike Flood didn’t deny co-host Joe Scarborough, who told him that six rural hospitals would likely shutter as a result of the massive cuts to Medicaid he voted for. In fact, Flood didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

Flood claimed that the Senate’s supplementary $50 billion fund for a rural health transformation program would offset some of the squeeze, but admitted that many rural hospitals would need to prepare to be stripped of essential services.

“Here’s the deal: Some hospitals in America, that are rural hospitals, are going to eventually have to transition from being acute bed hospitals into, like, an emergency room model,” Flood said.

The Senate’s $50 billion fund—which is little over one third of the estimated loss in federal funding to rural hospitals—-would force hospitals to “think creatively about what kind of services we need in really small towns,” Flood explained.

But it’s still unclear how exactly the money would be distributed, according to KFF. The law did not offer specific criteria that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would use to approve or deny applications for funding, rules about how cash would be allocated, or language requiring transparency about how the decisions are made. One can easily imagine that if the decision is in the hands of Trump, who has already moved to gut programs in blue states, total compliance with his agenda would be necessary to receive support.

Trump’s behemoth budget bill will cut nearly one trillion from Medicaid funding over the next 10 years, resulting in the mass closure of rural hospitals, which are already struggling to survive.

Because more people receive and rely on Medicaid coverage in rural communities than in urban areas, cuts to Medicaid would force rural hospitals, which already operate on razor thin margins, to absorb skyrocketing rates of uncompensated care, according to the National Rural Health Association. The continued strain will force them to cut services and personnel, and eventually close. More than 45 percent of rural hospitals in the United States operate with negative margins, and more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closing as a result of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”

And Nebraska, Flood’s home state, is no exception. The Nebraska Rural Health Association found that 39 of the state’s 71 rural hospitals have a two percent or less operating margin. Of those hospitals, 29 had negative operating margins in 2018, and 22 of them had a -3 percent margin or less.

The University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health published a report in May that found that cuts to Medicaid would cost 110,000 Nebraskans their health insurance and put 5,000 Nebraskans out of their jobs.

But when asked whether the Medicaid cuts would hurt rural hospitals, Flood claimed that his state was on an “upward trend” in terms of health care access. “We do have resources here, and our hospitals and doctors are providing great care. I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t live it. I live it, I live in it, I love it,” he said.

But it’s not whether the high quality care already exists, but how long it will be accessible that is concerning health care experts and constituents.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is exhausted with Republican leadership as they fluster and flounder the government shutdown.

So far, the government has been shut down for more than eight days—the result of a boiling disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, left over from the spring, about how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget.

Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would provide the executive branch with unfettered funds to advance the president’s agenda as outlined in his July legislation. That would include ruinous cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, a position that Democrats have demonstrated for months is a nonstarter.

In the eight days since discussions broke down, conservatives have overwhelmingly blamed Democrats for the federal failure. But in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, one of the party’s most far-right figures argued that Republicans’ blame game won’t get them very far with the American public—especially as the GOP clutches every branch of the federal government.

“There’s a lot of things we can be working on in the House, and that’s our appropriation bills. There’s many other bills we could be passing right now,” Greene said on the paper’s podcast Politically Georgia.

“I don’t think it’s believable to tell the American people that while we control the White House, the House, and the Senate, that we can’t return to work in Washington, D.C., because Chuck Schumer and six other Democrats won’t vote to open the government,” Greene continued. “I know people. They don’t believe that.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled chamber votes and sent lawmakers home earlier this month as party leadership works to negotiate with Democrats, but the decision hasn’t gone down well with members of his caucus.

“I’m against the [continuing resolution] and I’m for appropriations,” Greene said. “I really don’t see how we’ll ever pass the appropriations if we continue to sit at home and then we have another deadline coming on November 20.”

Beyond that, Republicans have failed to align their messaging on the shutdown, making for a messy public spectacle. Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have repeatedly flubbed attempts to coordinate their priorities with the White House, which has so far been more absorbed in punishing Trump’s political allies than in coming to a congressional resolution.

Still, none of Greene’s criticism was directed at Trump. Reacting in a separate interview to a Washington Post poll that found that the majority of Americans believed that Trump and Republicans in Congress were at fault for the shutdown, Greene said that she wouldn’t put the “blame on the president.”

“I’m actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune in the Senate,” Greene told CNN Thursday. “This should not be happening. As a member of Congress, we already have a low enough job approval rating. This shutdown is just going to drive everybody’s approval rating that much lower.”

The Georgia lawmaker has somewhat divorced herself from the MAGA brand in recent months.

Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has publicly broken with Trump several times since his inauguration. She’s differed from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and has also sparred with the White House over the executive branch’s apparent hostility toward demands to release the Epstein files. Now she appears to vehemently disagree with Trump’s position on the shutdown, which has thus far involved a blame campaign that legal experts argue is in violation of the Hatch Act.