President Donald Trump is trying to claim that it will be the Democrats’ fault if he uses the government shutdown to fire thousands of federal employees and cancel government-funded projects.
During an interview with far-right broadcaster One America News Network, the president addressed a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget instructing agencies to prepare for mass firings in the event of a shutdown, which then took effect Tuesday at midnight.
“Well, there could be firings, and that’s their fault, and it also could be other things,” Trump told OANN’s Daniel Baldwin. “We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut.”
The president had tried to use the threat of mass firings as leverage against Democrats refusing to support a GOP spending plan to keep the government funded past Sept. 30 unless it extended health-care tax subsidies and rolled back Republican cuts to Medicaid.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded to news of the memo last week with a statement saying the Trump administration had been firing federal employees “since day one—not to govern but to scare.”
“These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today,” he said.
The threat of firings came as news broke that the White House was begging hundreds of federal staffers laid off by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to return to work.
During the OANN interview, Trump claimed—without providing any evidence or legal authority—that the shutdown would give him extraordinary powers to fire employees and cancel projects that have already been funded.
“You could say—a lot of people are saying—Trump wanted this. That I wanted this closing,” he said. “And I didn’t want it. But a lot of people are saying it because I’m allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place, and I will probably do that.”
In a Truth Social post Wednesday night, he described the shutdown—which could push the economy into a recession and throw national air travel into chaos—as an “opportunity” for his party.
“Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud. Billions of Dollars can be saved. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote.
In the meantime, the president has ensured that his pet projects—including tariffs talks, drilling permits and an ostentatious new White House ballroom—will continued as planned.
That “let them eat cake” approach prompted California Gov. Gavin Newsom to troll Trump with an AI-generated image portraying the president as Marie Antoinette, the profligate French queen guillotined during the revolution.
“TRUMP ‘MARIE ANTOINETTE’ SAYS, ‘NO HEALTH CARE FOR YOU PEASANTS, BUT A BALLROOM FOR THE QUEEN!’” his press office wrote in a post on X.
