While administration officials have insisted that they are merely trying to slash the taxpayers money, and absolutely not targeting blue states out of, say, spite, the message from the president has been…slightly different. For one thing, he called the prospect of further cutting “Democrat agencies” an “unprecedented opportunity,” and posted a video on Truth Social last week that featured Vought as the grim reaper coming for Democrats. “By and large, during a shutdown a president seeks to minimize the pain on the American public. That’s not the case this time,” Senator Alex Padilla told Politico. “Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller and everybody around him are very intentional about exploiting the shutdown to make it more painful for people and constituencies that they deem the enemy. That’s absolutely un-American.” Matthew Lawrence, a law professor at Emory University, told the Times Trump’s actions are without precedent, saying, “I can’t think of a historical parallel of an administration publicly cutting funds in a shutdown like this.”
Of course, the president’s targeting of blue states via budget cuts comes as he has ordered the National Guard to Washington, DC; California; Chicago; and Oregon. On Sunday, the president told US naval recruits, “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” days after he told military generals to “handle” the “enemy from within.” (Over the weekend, Judge Karin Immergut—a Trump appointee—twice blocked the administration’s attempt to deploy National Guard troops in Oregon, writing in her first decision, “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” and saying the DOJ’s arguments for doing so “risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.” On Monday, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago filed a suit against the Trump administration to block it from sending Guard members from elsewhere in the country into the state and from federalizing the Illinois National Guard; a judge gave the administration until Wednesday night to respond.) The National Guard has also been deployed to Memphis, though the move has been welcomed by Governor Bill Lee. (Memphis mayor Paul Young says he is “certainly not happy” with the deployment.)
On Monday, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin defended the administration’s deployment of the National Guard to cities that do not want the military presence—like Chicago—saying Democratic leaders are “aiding and abetting domestic terrorists.”
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