Shutdown Showdown.
If a government shutdown wasn’t already exceedingly likely, President Donald Trump might have made it a near certainty Monday night.
The president posted a vulgar AI-generated deepfake video to his Truth Social slamming the top Democratic leaders — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — just hours after he hosted the two for an Oval Office meeting.
The video depicts Schumer and Jeffries as if speaking to reporters following the meeting, but the fabricated audio has Schumer saying Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and that “if we give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
That appears to be a crude reference to a shutdown talking point pushed by Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders noting that one Democratic demand is to reverse health care provisions in the recently enacted GOP megabill — including provisions aimed at excluding noncitizens from public benefits. Meredith Lee Hill ‘Politico’
Shutdown politics has gripped Washington for 30 years with the prospect of running out of money to fund things always right around the corner. The blame game is the most important aspect with politicians jockeying to get an advantage in the mind of the public because whomever is blamed by the electorate for the shutdown is the loser. Nobody wants to be the loser in all of this because the public is becoming less forgiving.
