With the clock ticking toward a federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump spent the week lobbing wild accusations and incendiary rhetoric — the most surreal of which came when he blamed Democrats for pushing “transgender for everybody.”
Yes, that’s a direct quote.
“They want to have transgender for everybody. These people are crazy — the Democrats,” Trump said, when asked about the looming shutdown. “So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down. But they’re the ones that are shutting down the government.”
The president didn’t explain what, exactly, he meant. There was no policy reference, no follow-up clarification — just a head-scratching, unprompted outburst seemingly detached from any of the actual negotiations over the federal budget.
This latest meltdown comes amid a rapidly devolving budget standoff, one that Trump himself seems to be encouraging.
Despite Republicans holding the White House, the House, and the Senate, Trump has directed GOP leaders not to negotiate with Democrats, even as a government shutdown draws closer by the hour. Earlier this week, he canceled a scheduled meeting with Democratic leadership and instead opted for finger-pointing from the Oval Office.
“Well, this is all caused by the Democrats,” Trump said Thursday, when asked why his administration was considering layoffs instead of the usual furloughs during a shutdown.
In other words: Republicans control every lever of power — but it’s still somehow the Democrats’ fault.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, sent lawmakers home already and, according to reporting from Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman, “may not bring the House back at all next week.” Sherman added that GOP leaders believe “the ball is in the Senate’s court” and that the House will return only “when they have a bill to pass.”
That bill isn’t likely to come any time soon.
In the meantime, Trump has used the shutdown threat to peddle a grab bag of conspiracies and falsehoods. He claimed Democrats are holding the budget hostage unless they receive “over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens.”
That claim isn’t true.
Nor are most of the others he rattled off during a now-infamous tirade, which included an eyebrow-raising stew of attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the U.S. healthcare system.
Trump accused Democrats of wanting to “force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.”
It’s an astonishing claim — entirely fiction, yet delivered with complete conviction.
The bottom line: the president of the United States is threatening to shut down the federal government, lay off workers, and crater key services — not because of any actual impasse over budget numbers, but to make unsubstantiated claims about immigration and gender identity.
As one senior Democratic aide put it bluntly: “This isn’t a negotiation anymore. It’s a hostage situation with no real demands.”
Watch the clip below:
