House Speaker Mike Johnson wants us to believe OMB Director Russ Vought isn’t salivating at the chance to punish people in blue states that Trump believes are all his political enemies during this shutdown. Sadly for him, Sen. Mike Lee made it obvious that isn’t the case.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did a great job of laying it all out this Thursday:
HAYES: You’re not hearing any empathy for regular folks from the White House. This administration is salivating at the opportunity to punish people. Specifically, they want to punish people in blue states who didn’t vote for Trump.
Russell Vought doesn’t pretend like this is anything but exactly the plan that he wrote in Project 2025. He gleefully posted this week “Nearly eight billion dollars in Green New Scam funding to fuel the left climate agenda is being canceled,” then listed more than a dozen exclusively blue states that he is singling out for punishment.
Now keep that tweet in mind when you listen to Republican Mike Johnson here, doing a kind of earnest liar routine about the heartbroken and honorable Russ Vought.
JOHNSON: Russ does this reluctantly. We had a 45 minute telephone conference with him yesterday. He talked to all the House Republicans. He takes no pleasure in this, because Russ has to sit down and decide, because he’s in charge of that office, which policies, personnel, and which programs are essential and which are not. That is not a fun task, and he is not enjoying that responsibility.
