With his baseless claim that “many” federal workers support the government shutdown quickly falling apart in the face of objections from public employees themselves, President Donald Trump suddenly shifted ground in a tweet Thursday morning, declaring—also without any evidence—that “most of the people not getting paid are Democrats.”
“Need to stop drugs, human trafficking, gang members, and criminals from coming into our country,” Trump wrote as the government shutdown over his demand for $5 billion in border wall funding continued into its sixth day. “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”
“At best, it looks like Trump is willing to keep the shutdown going because he believes it won’t hurt the people who vote for him,” Rafi Schwartz of Splinter News wrote. “At worst, it looks like the president of the United States—who unambiguously declared that he would 100 percent own this shutdown—is admitting that he’s deliberately punishing ‘most of the people not getting paid’ purely as an act of political retribution.”
Trump’s tweet came as federal workers who are already living paycheck to paycheck took to social media to share how the government shutdown has impacted them and their families, particularly during the holiday season.
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