President Trump’s strange obsession with Barack Obama is still going strong.

Trump brought up the former president during his long-winded address to the military in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday.

“I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs. … I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that.… You walk nice and easy. You’re not, you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down,” he said, going on a random tangent about being afraid to slip and fall while walking down the steps of Air Force One.

Trump: "One thing with Obama, I have zero respect for him, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop."

pic.twitter.com/PwYeBUIzsr

“But don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president. “But he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen, da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop,” he continued, doing a short little song and dance onstage. “He’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on, I said it’s great, I don’t wanna do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.”

There’s no good explanation—other than the Obama obsession that Trump and other MAGA acolytes seem to have—that would explain why Trump felt the need to riff about that in front of a room full of the country’s highest-ranking military leaders. At least he can carry a tune.

The labor market continued to struggle in August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published on Tuesday. The hiring rate in August—or, the number of hires as a share of total employment—dipped slightly from the prior month, down to just 3.2 percent.

Barring June 2024 and the onset of pandemic shutdowns in April 2020, the last time the hiring rate was so dire was during the Great Recession era, when unemployment exceeded 7 percent, observed economist Heather Long, who wrote on X that the “anemic” figure shows the job market is “frozen.”

“Americans feel stuck,” Long said. “And it appears to be getting worse.”

The number of available jobs in August, 7.2 million, was relatively unchanged from the previous month.

Tuesday’s figures, published in the BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, may be the last data we get from the agency for some time, thanks to a looming government shutdown.

BLS is supposed to issue its August jobs report, or the Employment Situation Summary, on Friday, after a delay from last week due to a “data quality issue,” per Axios. But it will be delayed further if Congress does not reach a funding deal and the government accordingly shuts down, as is expected, at midnight.

The disruption would pose a problem for the Federal Reserve, policymakers, economists, businesses, and others who rely on the report for a comprehensive view of the economy.

Republicans are actively trying to delay the release of the Epstein files.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was joined by other GOP leadership Tuesday in rejecting bids to swear in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva.

Grijalva won the special election in Arizona last week to replace her father, Raul Grijalva, making her the first Latina the Grand Canyon State has sent to Congress. She’s also the last signature that the House needs on a petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files—but Republicans are dragging their feet.

Instead, party leadership is refusing to swear in Grijalva until Congress returns to its regular session on October 3. But that’s not at all how Republicans treated their own representative-elects earlier this year: Party members didn’t delay swearing in Florida Republicans during a pro forma session in April, the day after they won their special elections.

The House was supposed to be in session on Monday and Tuesday, but Republican leaders canceled those work days in an attempt to strong-arm Democrats into accepting another stopgap funding measure that would benefit Donald Trump’s agenda.

“There’s no reason why I couldn’t have been sworn in, and it’s very problematic, because we’re facing a government shutdown. We’re going to have constituents who have questions, and there is nobody there to answer questions,” Grijalva told The Hill.

She added that Johnson had not provided a timeline for her swearing-in ceremony, telling the publication, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Grijalva’s swearing in appears to be noise in the background for House leadership, which is currently scrambling to prevent a government shutdown that would begin Tuesday night. But there’s plenty of precedent for Grijalva to be sworn in, even in such complicated circumstances. For instance, the entire House was sworn in during a shutdown in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Grijalva had already vowed to sign the bipartisan petition advancing the immediate release of the Epstein files. Just four Republicans have penned their signatures on the petition, demanding more transparency from the Trump administration regarding the investigation into deceased pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.

President Donald Trump begged top military brass Tuesday to clap for him as he unleashed a radical far-right tirade about using the armed forces........

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