House Speaker Mike Johnson wants us to believe OMB Director Russ Vought isn’t salivating at the chance to punish people in blue states that Trump believes are all his political enemies during this shutdown. Sadly for him, Sen. Mike Lee made it obvious that isn’t the case.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did a great job of laying it all out this Thursday:
HAYES: You’re not hearing any empathy for regular folks from the White House. This administration is salivating at the opportunity to punish people. Specifically, they want to punish people in blue states who didn’t vote for Trump.
Russell Vought doesn’t pretend like this is anything but exactly the plan that he wrote in Project 2025. He gleefully posted this week “Nearly eight billion dollars in Green New Scam funding to fuel the left climate agenda is being canceled,” then listed more than a dozen exclusively blue states that he is singling out for punishment.
Now keep that tweet in mind when you listen to Republican Mike Johnson here, doing a kind of earnest liar routine about the heartbroken and honorable Russ Vought.
JOHNSON: Russ does this reluctantly. We had a 45 minute telephone conference with him yesterday. He talked to all the House Republicans. He takes no pleasure in this, because Russ has to sit down and decide, because he’s in charge of that office, which policies, personnel, and which programs are essential and which are not. That is not a fun task, and he is not enjoying that responsibility.
HAYES: Oh, really? He’s not enjoying it? Russ Vought? Are we talking about the same Russ Vought? Because not all Republicans are as transparently full of it as Mike Johnson. Senator Mike Lee of Utah knows who Russ Vought is, what he’s up to, and that he loves it.
LEE: Russ Vought, the OMB Director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing this moment since puberty. Russ Vought has a plan, and that plan is going to succeed in empowering, further empowering Trump. This is going to be the Democrats worst nightmare, and it’s of their own making.
HAYES: That doesn’t sound like a guy’s heartbroken. I got to say that phrase preparing for this since puberty has been in my head all day. Anyway, the thing is, they’re not hiding anything. They are telling the American people to their faces they want to make your lives worse.
New York’s having two major infrastructure projects frozen worth 18 billion dollars. It’s not some newfangled cockamamie lefty scheme. No, it’s a tunnel in New Jersey and extension of the subway.
And that means people losing jobs, probably people who voted for Donald Trump. It also means just making life worse for commuters, including commuters who are Republicans and MAGA. They exist.
Bloomberg reports multiple Western states are losing out on an interstate energy hub, which would have brought a billion dollar investment into the region. And all this investment translates to jobs for people. People have to pay their mortgage or their rent or their loans, put food on the table.
As Greg Sargent notes in the New Republic, that energy hub was set to service three states, Washington, Oregon, and the red state of Montana.
What Trump doesn’t seem to understand or care about is that, there are Democrats in red states. There are Republicans who live in places like New York and New Jersey, too. Believe it or not, nearly one-third of all the votes Trump received in 2024 came from people in those states.
Republican congresspeople in those states have to deal with that reality now.
Hayes wrapped it up showing a clip of New York Rep. Mike Lawler talking about the pain being inflicted on New York.
Most of our corporate media keeps talking about how bad this shutdown is going to be for Democrats, ignoring the fact that these assholes are completely overreaching and doing exactly what they wanted to be doing anyway, along with the fact that we don’t have until the end of the year to get anything negotiated on insurance premiums for next year.
Republicans can’t seem to get their talking points straight on this shutdown. Good for Chris Hayes for giving them the grief they deserve for what they’re actually doing, and the fact that yes, they’re enjoying every minute of it, and at the expense of a whole lot of their own constituents.
