Trump promises firings, cuts to Democrats’ ‘favorite projects’ if shutdown continues
Donald Trump on Thursday said firings of federal workers and cuts to projects could occur if a government shutdown that began Wednesday continues, Reuters reports.
“There could be firings, and that’s their fault,” Trump said of Democrats in Congress, when asked during an interview with OAN television network about a recent memo from the Office of Management and Budget that raised prospects of firings.
“We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” he said, adding: “I am allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place and I will probably do that.”
Key events
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Closing summary
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Trump claims to have seen TV images which do not exist of Portland ‘burning down to the ground’
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With belligerent, mocking social media posts, White House treats shutdown like a political campaign
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Trump’s goal for 2026, amid political violence: ‘I want to survive’
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Newsom: No state funding for CA universities who sign Trump’s political pledge
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Trump promises firings, cuts to Democrats’ ‘favorite projects’ if shutdown continues
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Senate majority leader Thune says ‘unlikely’ shutdown will end this week
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Jeffries accuses White House and Republicans of wanting the shutdown
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Jeffries says Republicans ‘have shown zero interest’ in talks to find funding deal
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House minority leader Jeffries says Republicans shut down government because they ‘don’t want to provide healthcare’ to Americans
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Hamas to demand key revisions to Trump Gaza plan before accepting, sources say
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Donald Trump declares that US is in ‘non-international armed conflict’ with drug cartels operating in the Caribbean
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Senate to vote again on Friday on reopening government, says majority leader John Thune
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Judge denies Kilmar Ábrego García’s bid for asylum in the US
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‘It’s going to get more and more painful,’ says Mike Johnson, as he claims Trump and Vought making cuts ‘reluctantly’
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‘A tactic to punish’: Trump revives family separations amid drive to deport millions
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White House asks universities to commit to Trump’s priorities in exchange for preferential access to funding
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US government layoffs ‘likely to be in the thousands’, says White House
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Trump will draw red line for any Hamas response, says White House
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Treasury secretary Bessent says GDP could take a hit from government shutdown
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Trump meeting Russ Vought to discuss cutting ‘Democrat agencies’ and whether cuts will be permanent
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Trump tells Republicans to ‘clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud’
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Democrats hold firm on healthcare demands as US government remains shut
Closing summary
We are shutting down our live coverage of the second Trump administration, but just for the day. We will be open for business again on Friday morning. Here are the latest developments:
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Donald Trump told the pro-Trump network One American News that he had watched video that does not exist of mass arson in Portland, Oregon. “The governor says, ‘Oh, Portland is just fine,’ and then you turn on the television, you see the place is burning down to the ground,” Trump claimed, wildly exaggerating the hurling of a firework or two over the course of the past four months.
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The White House is in talks with CBS News program 60 Minutes about conducting an interview with Trump, Semafor reports.
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As the government shutdown drags on, the White House continues to use its official, taxpayer-funded social media accounts to insult and mock Democrats, treating the standoff more like a political campaign than a negotiation over policy.
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The government shutdown will likely go into next week, with Senate majority leader John Thune telling Politico that it is “unlikely” senators will be in the Capitol voting this weekend.
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The Trump administration is considering giving at least $10bn in aid to US farmers, as the agriculture industry begins to grapple with an economic fallout due to Trump’s tariffs, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Trump claims to have seen TV images which do not exist of Portland ‘burning down to the ground’
In an interview broadcast on Thursday by the pro-Trump network One American News, and posted in full by the White House, Donald Trump claimed to have seen something that does not exist: recent video of mass arson in the city of Portland, Oregon.
“Where do these people come from?” Trump told OAN’s White House correspondent Daniel Baldwin. “The governor says, ‘Oh, Portland is just fine,’ and then you turn on the television, you see the place is burning down to the ground, and it has been for a long time,” Trump claimed.
Baldwin, who is known for asking questions so flattering to Trump that the president frequently exclaims “I like this guy” during news conferences, nodded along, but the fact is that there is no such video, for the the good reason that Portland is not, in fact, burning.
While fireworks have been hurled on occasion during small protests outside one Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland’s south waterfront neighborhood over the past three months, there has been no arson anywhere in the city, which has largely returned to normal five years after the pandemic and mass protests for racial justice.
During the 2020 protests, there were instances of dumpsters set on fire by protesters, and some flag burning, but the idea that Portland was ever close to ‘burning to the ground’ that year, or at any time since, is a fever dream promoted by the conservative media channels the president consumes religiously.
Rather than explain this reality to the president, Baldwin followed up by asking Trump if Democratic governors, like Tina Kotek of Oregon, were “afraid” to let the president deploy troops because he had proven “that their policies have directly led to decline”.
“They’re either bad people,” Trump replied, “or they’re stupid.”
The White House is in talks with CBS News program 60 Minutes about conducting an interview with Donald Trump, Semafor reports, citing four people with knowledge of the discussions.
News of the possible interview comes amid reports that CBS-parent Paramount Skydance will soon announce its takeover of center-right online news outlet, The Free Press, and hire its co-founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
As David Klion reported for the Guardian media desk last month, Weiss, a former opinion editor and writer for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, first made her name as a pro-Israel student activist who campaigned against pro-Palestinian faculty at Columbia University.
Paramount in July agreed to pay $16m to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over his claim that CBS deceptively edited a 60 Minutes interview with his Democratic presidential opponent Kamala Harris last year. Trump had declined to sit for an interview at the time.
As the unedited video of the interview provided by CBS to the FCC showed, the editing of the interview with Harris for broadcast was routine and seemed to bear out the case made by legal experts that CBS would likely have won in court had the company chosen to resist Trump’s demands rather than give in to them to clear the way for the sale of Paramount to Skydance.
With belligerent, mocking social media posts, White House treats shutdown like a political campaign
As the government shutdown drags on, the White House continues to use its official, taxpayer-funded social media accounts to insult and mock Democrats, treating the standoff more like a political campaign than a good-faith negotiation over policy.
On Thursday, for instance, the official White House accounts on X and Instagram shared an updated version of the racist deepfake video of Democratic congressional leaders first posted by Donald Trump on Monday, which depicts the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, with a fake mustache and sombrero, and uses fabricated audio to make it seem as if the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called Democrats “woke pieces of shit”. The only update was to make the sombrero bigger, making good on a threat to make the sombrero “10x bigger” every day the shutdown goes on.
The sombrero, and a backdrop of Mexican mariachi music, is intended to drive home the false claim that, as another post on the same government-run account put it, “THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO GIVE YOUR HEALTHCARE MONEY TO ILLEGAL ALIENS.”
In fact, while the Democrats are fighting to extend government subsidies for health insurance to Americans who rely on policies offered at discount rates through Affordable Care Act exchanges, they are not calling for healthcare to be provided to immigrants without legal status.
Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democratic senator, responded to that false claim from the White House account, by writing on X: “TYPING SOMETHING IN ALL CAPS STILL DOESN’T MAKE IT TRUE.”
Another official White House account, dedicated to campaign style “rapid response” and run by a former Trump campaign staffer named Jake Schneider, replied to Smith like this: “Are you unable to read, Tina, or just dumb? It’s in your bill. Publicly available. Hope this helps.”
The post was accompanied by screenshots of legislation proposed by Democrats in which the words “Alien Medicaid Eligibility” were highlighted in yellow.
However, by reading past that heading, the actual text of the Democratic proposal makes it clear that the non-citizen “aliens” the legislation refers to are not “illegal aliens” but either: lawful permanent residents, which is to say, green-card holders; Cuban or Haitian refugees with legal status; or someone who “lawfully resides in the United States” with other documentation.
OpenAI asked a federal judge on Thursday to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it lured employees away from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI to steal its trade secrets, calling the case part of Musk’s “ongoing harassment” of the company, Reuters reports.
OpenAI denied xAI’s allegations and said its claims were false and unsubstantiated.
“Under Musk’s leadership, talented xAI employees are leaving in droves, and some are coming to OpenAI to help advance OpenAI’s mission,” the filing said. “Those employees have every right to go where they choose, and OpenAI has the right to hire them.”
Spokespeople and an attorney for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filings.
Michael Sainato
Senior officials inside Donald Trump’s administration have acknowledged the federal government shutdown, without an end in sight, could hurt the US economy. The damage could be worth billions of dollars each week, according to analysts.
“This isn’t the way to have a discussion, shutting down the government and lowering the GDP,” Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, told the CNBC financial news network. “We could see a hit to the GDP, a hit to growth and a hit to working America.”
A White House memo by the Council of Economic Advisers obtained by Politico suggested the economic hit could result in a $15bn loss in US gross domestic product every week the shutdown extends, with a monthlong shutdown resulting in an additional 43,000 unemployed workers.
White House officials already have a list of federal agencies they’re planning to target with firings, CNN reports. They might announce the firings as early as tomorrow, per CNN.
The White House has already compiled a list of agencies it’s planning on targeting with impending federal firings, which it’s expecting to announce as early as Friday, two WH officials tell me
The administration is still ironing out some of the specifics, but the list was…
— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) October 2, 2025
Trump’s goal for 2026, amid political violence: ‘I want to survive’
Lauren Gambino
When asked what role he might play in the 2026 midterm elections, Trump said he had “big plans”.
“I want to survive,” he said, again blaming Democrats for fomenting a rise in political violence that has hurt political leaders from both parties. “You look at what’s going on, it’s crazy. You know, the rhetoric that these crazy Democrats are using is very dangerous,” said Trump, who recently told the country’s top military brass that US troops should use “dangerous” American cities as “training grounds” in a fight against what he called the “enemy from within”.
The US president survived two assassination attempts and last month delivered a politically charged eulogy at the memorial of Charlie Kirk, a close political ally.
Trump has made several references to his own mortality of late. In August, Trump told Fox & Friends that his motivation for forging peace between Russia and Ukraine was a fear that he might not get into heaven when he dies.
During the interview with OAN, Trump bragged about having resolved numerous conflicts – seven, by his tally, a misleading and greatly embellished claim. “We put out seven wars,” Trump said. “Now it could be eight … it looks like the Middle East could very well be solved after 3,000 years of conflict.”
During his OAN interview, Trump fielded a series of soft-ball questions from the rightwing outlet that has long boosted the president and his agenda.
At the end of the interview, Daniel Baldwin, the reporter who heaped praise on the president and his accomplishments throughout, revealed that he was expecting his first child next year and asked Trump for some parenting advice.
“I always tell my kids. I always told them, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes,” Trump said.
Lauren Gambino
In his OAN interview, which took place on Wednesday, Trump again said that the administration was planning to send troops to Memphis and Chicago, which he has been teasing for some time. Asked if he had a date for the Chicago deployment, Trump said: “Pretty soon.”
“We’ve been there for five months with the FBI, just getting it ready for what we’re going to be doing,” he said.
Chicago’s political leaders, including the mayor, and the governor of Illinois have implored the White House not to send troops into the Democratic-run city, arguing that military troops have no place on American streets.
My colleage Lauren Gambino has another key line from the Donald Trump interview that aired today on One America News:
“A lot of people are saying Trump wanted this, that I wanted this closing, and I didn’t want it, but a lot of people are saying it because I’m allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place, and I will probably do that,” Trump said.
Federal authorities refuse to release a Michigan man in a pending deportation case, despite his life-threatening leukemia and the inconsistent healthcare he’s received while in custody since August, his lawyer said Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Jose Contreras-Cervantes, a 33-year-old married father of three who has been living in the US for about 20 years, without legal status, was arrested at a 5 August traffic stop in Macomb county, near Detroit. He had no criminal record beyond minor traffic offenses, said Miriam Aukerman, an ACLU lawyer.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan is now seeking a bond hearing for Contreras-Cervantes, which could allow him to return to his Detroit-area family and doctors while his case winds through immigration court. He’s currently being held at a detention center about three hours away.
Contreras-Cervantes was diagnosed last year with chronic myeloid leukemia, a life-threatening cancer of the bone marrow, said his wife, Lupita Contreras.
“The doctor said he has four to six years to live,” she said.
Trump’s proposed “compact” with nine prestigious universities was offered to schools that were seen by Trump as “good actors”, May Mailman, a senior White House adviser told the Wall Street Journal yesterday, with a president or a board who were, in the Trump administration’s view, “reformer[s]” who have “really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.”
The “compact” requires universities to eliminate departments that are seen as hostile or dismissive to conservatives, limit the proportion of international students on campus, accept the Trump administration’s definition of gender, and restrict the political speech of employees.
Among the universities the Trump administration is wooing with promises of preferential federal funding in exchange for compliance with Trump’s values is the University of Southern California, a private research university with an $8.2 billion endowment.
And even putting academic freedom aside, some of Trump’s proposals would be economically challenging for the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Times reported.
At USC, “26% of the fall 2025 freshman class is international,” the more than 50% of those students come from China or India, the Los Angeles Times reported. The Trump administration’s compact not only limits international student enrollment to 15% of students, but also requires that no more than 5% come from any one country.
“Full-fee tuition from international students is a major source of revenue at USC, which has undertaken hundreds of layoffs this year amid budget troubles,” the Los Angeles Times noted.
In threatening to cut state funding to any California university that cuts an ideological deal with Trump, California governor Gavin Newsom’s office called Trump’s proposed “compact” with nine leading American universities “nothing short of a hostile takeover of America’s universities.”
“It would impose strict government-mandated definitions of academic terms, erase diversity, and rip control away from campus leaders to install government-mandated conservative ideology in its place,” Newsom’s office said in a statement. “It even dictates how schools must spend their own endowments. Any institution that resists could be hit with crushing fines or stripped of federal research funding.”
Newsom: No state funding for CA universities who sign Trump’s political pledge
Any California universities that sign the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” will “instantly” lose their state funding, California governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
“If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding—including Cal Grants—instantly. California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom,” Newsom said in a statement.
Trump offered nine prominent universities, including the University of Southern California, the chance to sign his “compact” yesterday, which asked that the universities close academic departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” limit the proportion of international undergraduate students to 15% , and ban the consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, in exchange for “substantial and meaningful federal grants”.
Newsom’s office said Trump’s offer to universities “ties access to federal funding to radical conservative ideological restrictions on colleges and universities.”
Trump promises firings, cuts to Democrats’ ‘favorite projects’ if shutdown continues
Donald Trump on Thursday said firings of federal workers and cuts to projects could occur if a government shutdown that began Wednesday continues, Reuters reports.
“There could be firings, and that’s their fault,” Trump said of Democrats in Congress, when asked during an interview with OAN television network about a recent memo from the Office of Management and Budget that raised prospects of firings.
“We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” he said, adding: “I am allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place and I will probably do that.”
Senate majority leader Thune says ‘unlikely’ shutdown will end this week
The government shutdown will likely go into next week, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune telling Politico that it is “unlikely” senators will be in the Capitol voting this weekend.
“They’ll have a fourth chance tomorrow to vote to open up the government, and if that fails, we’ll give them the weekend to think about it, and then we’ll come back and vote on Monday,” the Republican senator said.
Thune also reiterated he will not negotiate the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which has been the point of contention leading to the government shutdown.
Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer previously said that Republicans need to work with Democrats “to reach an agreement to reopen the government and lower healthcare costs.”
The Trump administration is considering giving at least $10bn in aid to US farmers, as the agriculture industry begins to grapple with an economic fallout due to Trump’s tariffs, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The Journal reports that the Trump administration is considering using revenue from tariffs to fund the aid provided to US farmers and may start to be distributed in the coming months.
The deliberations are reportedly still ongoing and the deal to give billions for US farmers has not been finalized. A potential negotiation with China in the coming weeks may change Trump’s calculation to provide aid to the farmers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the Trump administration has done “nothing” to lower the high cost of living for people in the US, while at the same time giving the wealthy significant tax breaks.
“The Trump tariffs are actually making life more expensive,” Jeffries said. “And now Republicans refuse to do anything to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credit.”
