Donald Trump was very presidential about the government shutdown.

America’s social media–obsessed leader was busy posting racist, artificially generated cartoons as the clock ticked down Tuesday evening.

It’s the first government shutdown since late 2018, when the 116th Congress failed to come to an agreement on how to fund the country for 34 days under Trump’s first administration. But having experience with these sorts of things apparently doesn’t lend to improved leadership.

There were many things that Trump could have done before the government ran out of funding. For instance, Trump actually did have congressional leadership in the White House on Tuesday—but rather than leverage the weight of his office to mediate between the country’s diametrically opposed political parties, the president used House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for a “Trump 2028” photo shoot without their consent.

The 79-year-old had already used their images and voices without their consent on Monday to create an AI video falsely depicting Schumer claiming that “nobody likes Democrats anymore” because of the party’s “woke trans bullshit.” Beside him is a silent Jeffries in a superimposed Mexican sombrero with a curled mustache. Mariachi music plays in the background.

Tuesday night, just hours away from the shutdown, Trump shared a clip of Jeffries on MSNBC in which the New York politician called Trump’s AI gimmick a “disgusting video” laden with “bigotry.” But Trump’s post was, in itself, another AI-generated taunt: Halfway into the tape, a mariachi band composed of several Trumps appears in the background, and another sombrero and a mustache is placed on Jeffries’s face.

The Trump War Room X account also posted an AI-generated photo of Representative Maxine Waters with a sombrero and cartoonishly large mustache.

The extremely mature response to the shutdown definitely did not denigrate the office of the president at all. Meanwhile, thousands of federal employees are expected to be furloughed (Trump has threatened to fire them while they’re gone); federal services—including their websites—have ground to a halt; and the stock market is already slipping in reaction.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the same spending bills it failed to pass last night at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

In the latest sign that the labor market is experiencing a serious contraction, the U.S. private sector lost 32,000 jobs in September, according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday.

The loss, the worst figure reported by the payroll-processing company in two and a half years, was far below the 45,000-job increase that had been forecast by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.

ADP data from August was also revised, indicating that the economy actually shed 3,000 private-sector jobs, rather than gaining 54,000 as was previously reported.

That makes August and September the first consecutive negative months since Covid-19 was ravaging the economy. The ADP also reported losses in June, meaning it’s also the first time since the pandemic era when three of four consecutive months have seen losses. (In 2020, the private sector shed jobs each month from March to July.)

The worrying snapshot of Trump’s economy comes as this week’s government shutdown has cast the United States into a blackout of government economic data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was scheduled to deliver its much-anticipated monthly jobs report on Friday (after a delay from last week) but will not do so should the shutdown persist through the end of the week.

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Wednesday as reporters fact-checked his claim that Democrats had shut down the government because they wanted to lavish undocumented immigrants with free health care.

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Johnson was brutally fact-checked on his outlandish claims about the Democratic proposal to extend tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that were set to expire at the end of the year. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for those tax credits, and an estimated 5.1 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2034 if ACA funding expires at the end of the year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“The Democratic proposal is designed to prevent millions of Americans from losing their health insurance, losing Medicaid coverage, or paying higher health care premiums. Why are you against that?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“That’s an absurd statement, what you said there,” Johnson said.

“It’s a factual statement,” Stephanopoulos replied.

Johnson insisted his effort to pass a clean continuing resolution had been thwarted by Democrats. “The Democrats said instead that they wanted to give health care........

© New Republic