Getting ready to a probably devastating authorities shutdown, Trump spent his day with Pete Hegseth haranguing generals at a summit that ought to’ve been an e-mail.
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media on the South Garden of the White Home earlier than boarding Marine One in Washington, DC, on September 30, 2025.
(Francis Chung / Politico / Bloomberg through Getty Photos)
As I write this, the US authorities is within the early phases of one other shutdown, this one triggered by the Republicans’ refusal to budge on funding healthcare subsidies that maintain insurance coverage inside attain for tens of hundreds of thousands of low-income People.
Trump’s response has been confrontational—to say the least. Over the previous week, along with posting racist memes about Home minority chief Hakeem Jeffries, the president has gloated on the likelihood a shutdown offers him to fireplace big numbers of federal staff—that is on prime of the 300,000 who’ve already departed federal authorities service since January. These received’t be short-term layoffs or furloughs, Trump instructed NBC Information, however “on a permanent basis.”
This isn’t a good-faith political negotiation; it is a hostage scenario. Do precisely what Trump needs, the Democrats are being instructed, or a whole bunch of 1000’s of staff and their households will lose their careers, livelihoods, and technique of placing meals on the desk.
For Trump, these households are collateral injury in his energy video games. However for the individuals who took an oath to serve the American folks, it’s a potential disaster. Regardless of what Trump and Musk declare about bloated bureaucracies and overpaid staff, the overwhelming majority of federal staff aren’t rich. The average salary for a federal employee is $97,000, and most beginning salaries pay far much less. Whereas researching my upcoming e book on fired federal staff, I interviewed an IRS employee whose job it was to speak with taxpayers on the cellphone eight hours per day, a younger USGS researcher, and a NOAA contracts specialist. Their salaries have been nearer to $50,000 than $97,000.
In different phrases, the kind of folks whom Trump is sacrificing for energy are precariously perched on the base of the American center class. Like most People, they stay paycheck to paycheck. Their financial savings, if they’ve any, are meager. Their potential to cowl payments in the event that they miss a pay cycle or two is doubtful at greatest. If they’re fired as a result of Trump is utilizing the shutdown to additional eviscerate authorities, they’ll enter a souring labor market saturated with former federal staff and contractors all competing for a similar jobs. Most of the folks I talked with who misplaced their jobs within the first spherical of DOGE purges utilized for a whole bunch of positions with out success. Theirs is a narrative of downward mobility and rising insecurity dropped at them courtesy of the US authorities.
Present Concern
Nevertheless it isn’t solely federal staff who will undergo. Each particular person in the USA who depends on authorities providers—so just about each particular person within the nation—will really feel the implications. Authorities companies, already hamstrung by the DOGE cuts and by the assaults on science, variety, and any effort to inject social-justice priorities into authorities, can be more and more unable to ship fundamental items, whether or not it’s FEMA responses to disasters or TSA checkpoints at airports that don’t include hours-long delays.
And the way did Trump spend the day within the lead-up to the federal government shutdown?
He and his Cro-Magnon buddy Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented assembly of the army’s prime brass from everywhere in the world—an occasion that, at a conservative estimate, will value US taxpayers many hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. Trump watched Hegseth spend the morning berating the generals and admirals about “woke” ideology within the army, “fats” troopers, the necessity for troops to recommit to a “warrior ethos,” the urgency of releasing the army from guidelines of engagement that stop it from committing struggle crimes, and the requirement for enlistees to satisfy the “highest degree of male health.” He even discovered time to defend hazing rituals for recruits.
All of this bilious macho twaddle might have been mentioned equally properly—or, slightly, equally offensively—in an e-mail or through a safe video convention. The one conceivable objective of flying a whole bunch of prime army commanders and their workers out to Virginia was in order that the reality-TV protection secretary might strut his stuff on the small display screen. Maybe, with the cash saved from not internet hosting this inane gathering, they may have paid a few of the enlisted women and men who received’t be receiving their paychecks throughout the federal government shutdown.
By no means one to cede the highlight, Trump chose to speak on the summit too, and he once more confirmed his disdain for the Structure and the Posse Comitatus Act, this time by suggesting that he would possibly use the nation’s “harmful cities” as a coaching floor for army recruits. (This could be so unlawful that even this Supreme Courtroom might need second ideas about greenlighting it.) He urged troops in these cities to “hit” protesters, telling them they may do no matter they needed in opposition to individuals who spat at them or broken their automobiles. He threatened army leaders who disagreed with him, saying that in the event that they refused to obey him and give up, “there goes your rank, there goes your future, however you simply really feel good and unfastened, OK?” He teased the concept of constructing a fleet of cutting-edge, early-Twentieth-century-type battleships. And he defined to the viewers of four-star generals—together with the African American brass whom Hegseth hasn’t but gotten round to firing—that there have been two “N-words” that he wasn’t allowed to bandy about; the primary, he mentioned, was “nuclear,” as if, someway, the world’s largest nuclear superpower, and the one nation to have ever dropped an atomic bomb in struggle, had misguidedly adopted a Japanese-styled pacifist overseas coverage. The second… properly, he left that phrase to his viewers’s creativeness.
Sure, Trump couldn’t cover his disappointment at not being allowed to make use of an offensive racial epithet in his public pronouncements. Nor, as his ridiculous, clearly senescent, “speech” dragged on, might he cover his disappointment at the truth that his applause traces have been greeted primarily by an unrelenting, stony silence. The generals and admirals, it turned out, weren’t shopping for what he was promoting; they didn’t assume it was humorous that the commander in chief was making jokes in regards to the “N-word.”
No worries, although. It seems there are many different methods to inject racial animus into American life. Of their quest to Make America White Once more, Trump and his minions have made it clear that the deportation machine will proceed buzzing alongside no matter any authorities shutdown. Actually, whereas Trump was haranguing the generals and federal companies have been getting ready to shutter nationwide parks and lower off funds to meals banks and well being facilities, ICE was busy deporting greater than 100 individuals who had fled the Iranian regime again to Iran. It was, The New York Occasions dryly famous, a uncommon second of détente between Trump and the mullahs. And so, in a break with earlier US coverage to not ship dissidents into the fingers of governments that may probably imprison, torture, and even kill them, the USA flew the unlucky asylum seekers again to Tehran. Trump’s crowning achievement is morally hollowing out the USA. He and his protection secretary are fetishizing struggle crimes, and his administration is tearing down the non-security companies of the federal authorities. It’s a legacy of unremitting disgrace and degradation.
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