Trump Says His Shutdown Is Specifically Harming Democratic Voters

Now that Donald Trump is back in the country following his disastrous (and potentially rule-breaking) political stunt of a trip to Iraq, let’s check in on how things are going in Washington D.C., where the federal government remains at a partial standstill thanks to the White House’s obstinate refusal to sign a bipartisan budget deal that doesn’t include money for the president’s big, beautiful wall.

At best, it looks like Trump is wiling to keep the shutdown going because he believes it won’t hurt the people who vote for him. At worst, it looks like the President of the United States—who unambiguously declared that he would 100% own this shutdown—is admitting that he’s deliberately punishing “most of the people not getting paid” purely as an act of political retribution.

On Christmas, Trump claimed that “Many of those [furloughed government] workers have said to me, communicated, stay out until you get the funding for the wall.”

“These federal workers want the wall,” he added.

The head of the 700,000-strong American Federation of Government Employees responded to the president’s claim on Wednesday, calling it “false” and declaring that most of the union’s members “view this as an act of ineptitude.”