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This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 1 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The Trump administration is running a PR campaign to convince everyone — incorrectly — that the Democrats are solely to blame for the government shutdown.
During a news conference on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the “Democrats have put us into this position.” Vice President JD Vance expressed a similar sentiment, telling reporters that “the Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic Party shut down the government.” The administration has plastered that sentiment across a bunch of government websites, in what looks like a clear violation of government ethics rules.
The administration’s argument doesn’t make any sense considering how it has conducted itself over the last nine months.
But when you think about it, the administration’s argument doesn’t make any sense, considering how it has conducted itself over the last nine months. Donald Trump has been governing like an authoritarian: He promised to be a dictator on Day 1. He’s compared himself to America’s king and even the pope. The goal of this second term appears to be to assert complete control over every aspect of the federal government.
Trump wants to directly control who gets fired across the entire government and civil society, from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to talk show hosts. He wants to directly control who gets indicted — most recently with the ridiculous prosecution of James Comey. He says he can raise taxes on the American people by a trillion dollars and rescind or reallocate congressionally appropriated funds, entirely by executive fiat.
But now it’s the Democrats who are in the driver’s seat when it comes to shutting down the government? That’s a pretty tough sell. Especially considering that Trump is using the shutdown to govern like a king.
On Wednesday, Russell Vought, the top Trump official responsible for implementing the president’s agenda, announced that more than $8 billion in federal funding, appropriated exclusively for blue states, would be frozen or canceled. That includes transportation infrastructure spending in New York and climate infrastructure spending in more than a dozen other states, including California, Washington and New Jersey. The Trump administration is now clawing back that congressionally approved funding, citing “DEI” and the “Green New Scam.”
Vought has also indicated he will use the shutdown as an excuse to fire even more federal workers, in an extension of the reckless DOGE cuts this administration unilaterally enacted earlier this year.
New polling indicates that more Americans are blaming the Republicans for the shutdown than the Democrats.
Now, Trump is bragging about making “irreversible” changes to federal funding. “The last person that wants a shutdown is us,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them — like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”
Speaking of DOGE, it’s worth noting the Trump-backed bailout of the administration’s kooky, far-right buddy in Argentina. The administration is giving President Javier Milei a $20 billion bailout to help his struggling economy, ahead of Argentina’s upcoming elections.
Democrats in Congress don’t get any say in that. All of that is being done without any outside input. But the Democrats are the ones responsible for shutting down the federal government?
Well, folks aren’t buying it. In fact, a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll indicates that more Americans are blaming the Republicans for the shutdown than the Democrats, because it is obviously the case to anyone paying attention that Trump is running the show, as terrible as that show may be.