President Donald Trump hit out at Democrats with a rabidly partisan attack during a meeting with a foreign leader on Tuesday, dubbing the opposition party as “insurrectionists” and threatening to give his budget director free rein to slash government jobs and programs as he answered questions alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office.
Trump was in the middle of a long-winded soliloquy about the benefits of his Big Beautiful Bill tax cut and spending package when he laid into Democrats for having opposed the legislation.
“I was greatly helped by our speaker, Mike Johnson and by the Senate. I’ll tell you what, John Thune has been — both of those guys have been incredible … because these Democrats are like insurrectionists … they’re so bad for our country, so their policy is so bad for our country,” he said.
Trump was also asked whether his administration intends to honor a law he signed during his first term, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which requires furloughed workers to be paid “at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends.”
Although the law is clear on the subject, the Office of Management and Budget recently rewrote their shutdown guidance to cast doubt on whether workers will be made whole after going without pay since last Tuesday.
Trump replied that it would “depend on who we’re talking about” and blamed Democrats for having “put a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy” while suggesting that some workers don’t deserve back pay.
“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” he ominously said.
Trump’s implicit threat not to pay federal workers despite the clearly written law enacted during his first four years in the White House is consistent with a long history of failing to pay contractors and vendors during his many years as a businessman and hotel/casino operator.
In 2016, USA Today reported that he’d stiffed “hundreds of people” including carpenters, painters, dishwashers, and even attorneys who worked for him.
He told the newspaper at the time that he’d routinely “deduct” from what he owed vendors if he disliked their work.
“Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely,” Trump said.
Pressed further on whether federal workers will be paid as the law requires, Trump later told reporters: “I follow the law and what the law says is correct.”
The president’s comments came on the seventh day of the first government shutdown since a 35-day lapse in appropriations during his first term.
Hundreds of thousands of workers were furloughed or forced to work without pay starting one week ago when legislators failed to advance a Republican-authored temporary funding bill, with most Democratic senators stating that they won’t vote for any legislation that doesn’t extend tax credits that help approximately 10 million Americans purchase health insurance.
Trump has threatened to use the temporary shutdown to permanently gut programs favored by Democrats and fire federal workers who his supporters view as “deep state” members opposed to him and his administration.
During his sit-down with Carney, he threatened to allow Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to begin slashing things “pretty soon” when asked if he has a list of programs to eliminate.
“We have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate and permanently eliminate,” he said.
The president described Vought, a longtime GOP activist who was depicted as the Grim Reaper in an AI-generated video he posted over the weekend, as a “very serious person” who is currently “sitting there and getting ready to cut things.”
When pressed further on whether there’s a list of programs to cut, he said he’d be able to reveal it “in four or five days” if the shutdown continues.
“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” he said.
