Trump’s Shutdown Extortion: Lies, Bribes, and a War on Democracy

Dark money, foreign payoffs, and dangerous lies are pushing what's left of our government to the edge…

If his lips move, he’s lying. Or trying to solicit a bribe. Or slandering Democrats. Or, today, taking hostages.

Most recently, he’s started lying about what congressional Democrats are demanding in exchange for giving the GOP the votes they need in the Senate to keep the government open past October 1.

And now, just this morning, they’ve announced that they’re taking hostages. Federal employees will be fired, rather than temporarily furloughed, if there is a government shutdown.

But I’ll get to that in a moment; it isn’t where he started lying, bribe-getting, and slandering Democrats this week.

That was when the entire world watched, aghast, as Trump fulfilled his commitment to the fossil fuel industry and repeatedly lied before the assembled United Nations about fossil fuels, renewable energy, and climate change.

Back in April of last year, he’d addressed a private group of fossil fuel executives and billionaires, and said that he was offering them a “deal”: if they’d give his campaign massive contributions, he’d do pretty much whatever they wanted. The Hill has documented almost $140 million in bribes contributions that followed the speech, and there’s likely far, far more in dark money contributions that we’ll never know about.

Thus, an embarrassed America had to watch as the entire world was treated to the president of the United States lying repeatedly in exchange for over a hundred million dollars. After all, his lips were moving.

As the Emiratis bet recently when they put $2 billion into a little crypto company that the Trump family and the Steve Witkoff family had started, and, apparently in exchange, Trump authorized the transfer of about a half-million top-tech chips to the UAE that had been blocked by national security concerns.

Generally, that’s called a “bribe,” although without the FBI doing an investigation we won’t know for sure. At the very least, it’s a conflict of interest. Ryan Cummings of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy, said:

“If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it’s not even close.”

As our Constitution says:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (emphasis added)

And now, on the verge of a government shutdown, Trump has rolled out one of the most audacious lies of the past…er…week. On his Nazi-infested failing social media site, he wrote:

“After reviewing the details of the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive.

“They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), 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.”

Let’s examine that:

— “over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending” is extraordinarily misleading. Even Republicans claim that would be the cost over 10 years to continue the ACA subsidies, so people’s insurance costs don’t explode at the start of next year. And don’t forget that Republicans cut that trillion dollars in ACA and Medicaid spending so they could give a $3.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends.

— “to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens” is up to the states, not the feds, as they control how their Medicaid dollars are disbursed. Most Blue states make their programs available to all legal immigrants, and some extend that to undocumented people, particularly pregnant women (and most Red states don’t). The reason is simple: we all share the same space. You don’t want the undocumented person standing behind you in line at the grocery store to have an active case of TB, for example; keeping everybody healthy is only common sense.

— “force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors” is complete horseshit. The Democratic leaders’ public position in the shutdown talks is an “ironclad” extension of ACA premium tax credits and reversing recent Medicaid cuts, full stop.

— “have dead people on the Medicaid roles [sic]” is another lie. Democrats’ Continuing Resolution (CR) demand is entirely and 100% about health coverage affordability and undoing cuts, not “funding dead people.”

— “allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits” is even beyond a lie, it’s a slander against both immigrants and Democrats. There is nothing even remotely close to letting anybody “steal” anything in their CR demand.

— “try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World,” is another libel against Democrats and the Biden administration. No president of either party since the 1920s has tried to “open our borders” to anybody, particularly criminals. And, again, the only firm Democratic demand is to extend the ACA/Obamacare subsidies and undo the cuts to Medicaid.

— “allow men to play in women’s sports” is both another lie and an attempt to inflame his queer-hating base. There’s no mention of this anywhere in anything any Democrat has said with regard to the CR and it’s not in their formal proposal. And the official Democratic Party position is that officials with responsibility for every sport should be able to decide if they want to allow trans athletes to compete or not (would anybody care if the sport was a Chess tournament?). Ironically, that’s the “small government” position.

— “essentially create Transgender operations for everybody” is so absurd as to be laughable, if it wasn’t that so many Republicans actually believe things Trump and his lickspittles in the rightwing media sewer put out.

On top of all that, the Trump administration announced today that if Democrats won’t vote to help keep the government open, they will begin mass layoffs of federal employees. This is pure hostage-taking, and radically raises the stakes for the Democrats in the Senate.

At the moment, the only solid demands Democrats are making in exchange for their vote to keep the government open are to extend the Obamacare subsidies and eliminate the Medicaid cuts that will phase in during January, 2027 just after the 2026 midterm elections.

They should, in my opinion, add the release of the Epstein files and the unmasking of ICE to that list.

America deserves to know if, in addition to having had a jury already determine that this convicted felon is also a rapist, our president was also involved in the abuse of young girls.

And polling shows that Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with unaccountable, masked secret police patrolling our streets and violently attacking citizens and protesters.

Whatever they do, though, I agree with the comment former Republican (now Democratic) Congressman Joe Walsh said on my SiriusXM radio program yesterday:

Every Democrat in the Senate should spend the next month in the reddest parts of their states doing town halls where Republicans refuse to, leaving the administration to twist in the wind of the bad publicity as the government shuts down and they begin firing federal workers.

Or conducting mock hearings about the UAE chips-bribery and the Epstein files.

What Trump’s doing with today’s mass firing threat is nothing short of economic terrorism against the American people.

For decades, government shutdowns meant temporary furloughs that were painful but reversible. Now, Trump and his cronies are using the threat of mass, permanent firings to gut the very institutions that protect our food, our air, our water, our workers, and our democracy itself.

This isn’t about budgets; it’s about power. It’s about dismantling the federal government so only Trump’s priorities — ICE, border patrol, and his authoritarian machinery — are left standing.

It’s a smash-and-grab of our constitutional order, a direct assault on Congress’s power of the purse, and an act of extortion against the American people: “Give us what we want, or we’ll torch the house.”

And here’s the bottom line: Democrats must never give in to hostage takers, because if you pay the ransom once, the next demand will be even bigger, the next threat even worse. Authoritarians don’t just bend the rules, they burn them down, and the only way to stop them is to refuse to play their game.

Courage!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Shutdown Scam”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now availble in bookstores nationwide.
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