What did Donald Trump do today?

He got health care, of an unspecified sort, while others lost theirs.

Trump visited Walter Reed Medical Center today for what the White House described as a routine physical—his second in less than six months. 

It is, to be blunt, unlikely that this is the real reason. Even if Trump, who is 79, required routine health monitoring more often than once a year, that could be and historically has been done without requiring the president to visit a hospital.

Trump has manifested a wide range of troubling physical and cognitive symptoms during his second term, when he has been well enough to appear in public at all. Although his staff denies it, he has almost certainly been receiving intravenous drug infusions, as evidenced by the telltale bruise on the back of his hand that he has tried to conceal by slathering makeup on it. He's suffering from severe edema in his lower extremities, which the White House eventually admitted to after photographs of grossly his swollen ankles made the news. He's frequently had difficulty staying awake during the day, and while he is spending more weekends than ever at one of his private golf courses, there's less evidence than before that he's actually playing golf, which would require at least some mobility. That may be because Trump is having difficulty walking in a straight line, something that was painfully obvious as he staggered from one side of a red carpet to the other during a recent meeting with Vladimir Putin. 

It's clear that Trump's physical wellness is an increasing source of concern to him. He has, very uncharacteristically, started talking about his place in the afterlife, volunteering his belief that if he accomplishes certain goals while in office, he'll be able to get into heaven. He's also become defensive about his increasingly obvious frailty, at one point showing jealousy about how the younger and fitter President Obama would run down stairs, rather than slowly and cautiously lowering himself down them as Trump does.

Of course, physical deterioration is simply a natural part of aging, and not in and of itself a problem for the presidency. The mounting evidence of Trump's cognitive decline is another matter. Just in the last few months, he's fallen for AI scams, announced a "new" policy he'd forgotten about in the few months since the last time he announced it, forgotten which countries were involved in the "wars" he claims to have ended, forgotten about a major military operation from his first term, accused pharmaceutical companies of conspiring to cover up good news about vaccines, and gotten confused about whether his TV was "lying to him," among other things.

Trump took advantage of his unlimited access to taxpayer-funded healthcare on the same day that federal health workers received layoff notices from the Department of Health and Human Services. According to HHS, these layoffs are related to the ongoing government shutdown over Trump's refusal to fund health insurance premiums. These workers are the first federal employees to lose their jobs since Trump's recent threat to fire people in "popular Democrat programs"—by which he apparently meant healthcare.

Why does this matter?

• All Americans deserve health care of the quality—and quantity—that Donald Trump is getting. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He told a ridiculous lie about how he'd "saved" Americans from a year's worth of overdose deaths in a few weeks.

Trump held yet another Cabinet meeting. As is always the case with Trump, the majority of the multi-hour meeting consisted of Cabinet secretaries lavishing praise on him. Trump also spoke, telling outright lies on subjects ranging from vaccination to the fictitious "wars" he's ended. (Here's one spot-check of the more deceptive or mathematically impossible things Trump said today.)

Notably, Trump repeated his claim that his destruction of four Venezuelan ships, supposedly carrying drugs, have saved American lives. "Every single boat that you see getting taken out kills 25,000 Americans, think of that." This is, to be kind, preposterous. About 82,000 Americans died of overdoses last year—fewer than Trump claims to have already prevented in the last few weeks—and many of those were from abuse of prescription medications.

The vast majority of nonprescription narcotics (mostly heroin) used by Americans come from Mexico. Trump has claimed that he can somehow see "bags of fentanyl" in the wreckage of the boats he's ordered destroyed, but fentanyl—an extremely concentrated prescription drug sometimes cut into other drugs—is overwhelmingly smuggled in by American citizens at border crossings.

What makes Trump's lie about the threat posed by the ships he's had destroyed particularly egregious is that he has presented no evidence that any of them were involved in the drug trade—and there is mounting evidence to the contrary. Video from the first attack showed there were a large number of people on board the relatively small boat as it headed to Trinidad, the opposite of what would be expected for a drug smuggling operation. 

Yesterday, the president of Colombia claimed that the most recent boat destroyed was Colombian, and had Colombian citizens aboard. President Gustavo Petro didn't offer any evidence—but then neither has Trump. Essentially everything Trump or other administration officials have said, other than the ridiculous claim about saving lives, has been jokes about killing Venezuelan fishermen. 

Trump's budget bill slashed $26 billion from programs to treat drug addiction and prevent overdoses, on top of $11 billion in grants he froze earlier this year.

Why does this matter?

• Trump probably believes what he is saying here, which is its own kind of problem. 

• Military strikes that aren't or can't be justified are just extrajudicial murder. 

• Presidents who care about Americans dying of drug overdoses generally try to do something about drug overdoses.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again said his political opponents should be arrested, for no real reason.

This morning, Trump declared on his private social media site that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be "in jail" for "failing to protect" federal ICE agents.

ICE agents in Chicago are not in danger, although a few of its spokespeople have falsely claimed that the Chicago Police Department has refused to answer its calls for protection. In reality, they are responding to those calls. ICE agents claimed on Saturday that a woman following a convoy of their vehicles "rammed" one of them, but body camera footage introduced in an arraignment hearing contradicts that claim. It does show an ICE agent approaching her stopped vehicle and yelling "Do something, bitch," before shooting her five times. 

Chicago residents, however, have been repeatedly put in danger by ICE and CBP "raids," These have increasingly taken the form of simply arresting anyone based on "how they look" in terms of race and skin color, as a Border Patrol official detailed to the city openly admitted to reporters last week. A midnight raid on an apartment building in a mostly Black neighborhood on September 30th saw over 130 people—most of them American citizens—stunned by flashbang grenades and dragged out into the street. Witnesses reported small children being handcuffed, victims being interrogated without legal counsel, and apartments left destroyed.

Trump's demand that Pritzker and Johnson be jailed comes on the same day as reporting confirms that when Trump posted a demand to his social media site that "Pam" find a way to charge former FBI Director James Comey with some kind of crime, he had actually intended to send her a direct message. 

In other words, Trump forgot how to use his own boutique microblogging site and mistakenly broadcast what was supposed to be a confidential (if extremely unlawful) message to his Attorney General. "Truth Social" is a rebranded copy of an open-source social media platform, and its messaging function is not secure against sophisticated attackers. This means that Trump has almost certainly been sending orders to Cabinet officials in full view of foreign intelligence agencies.

Why does this matter?

• Arresting political opponents for any crime or no crime at all is what dictators do.  

• There's no doubt whatsoever that federal agencies are trying to stir up racial violence to give Trump an excuse to directly attack American cities.

• The Constitution is too strong, and Donald Trump is too weak, for this to work.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he'd just pick and choose who and what the government spends money on, and never mind appropriations. 

Trump made two alarming claims about the ongoing government shutdown today, both of them false. The first was that he'd fund the WIC program out of revenue raised from tariffs—but there is no WIC funding until money is appropriated to it. Currently, Congress has failed to pass an appropriations bill due to Trump's insistence that health insurance subsidies for about 25 million Americans be zeroed out, which will double or even triple the cost of premiums in some parts of the country.

On a related matter, Trump was asked about back pay for federal workers furloughed (or simply required to work without pay) during the shutdown. He replied that he'd decided who he'd "take care of" on an individual basis, adding, "There are some [government workers] that really don’t deserve to be taken care of. And we’ll take care of them in a different way."

Of course, it doesn't work that way—at all. If it did, there would be no budget shutdown in the first place: Trump could simply decree that Affordable Care Act tax credits don't exist, instead of trying and (so far) failing to get a bill through Congress saying that they don't. For that matter, there wouldn't be any need for appropriations at all: just Trump, the Treasury, and whatever he wanted to spend taxpayers' money on.

But in the real world, there are two legal issues with Trump's threat. The first is a law passed during the last Trump shutdown in 2019 that guarantees back pay to all government workers affected by it. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (or GEFTA) requires that federal employees who are

furloughed as a result of a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations, and each excepted employee who is required to perform work during a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for such work, at the employee’s standard rate of pay, at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.

The Trump administration has abruptly removed legal guidance informing departments of their obligation to pay government workers currently going without pay. 

The other reason Trump can't simply pick and choose who gets paid or what government programs get funded is the Constitution, which is very clear that appropriations are a matter of law and not presidential whim:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

 

Why does this matter?

• No matter how many times he needs to be reminded of it, Trump is not a king. 

• Laws don't cease to exist just because they're inconvenient for a president.  

• Neither does the Constitution.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said protests featuring a man in an inflated frog costume might be an "insurrection."

Recapping recent events: on Saturday, a federal judge in Oregon temporarily barred Trump from federalizing the Oregon National Guard on the grounds that his claims that Portland was "burning to the ground… every night" were "untethered to facts." Then, on Sunday, when Trump tried to get around that order by sending already-federalized California National Guard troops to Portland instead, the same judge barred that action too as an illegal end-run around her first order.

Today, Trump suggested he might try a different tactic: invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that governs how the military can be deployed as a police force against American citizens.

That would solve the legal angle for Trump, except that the law requires that there be

unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.

There are certainly assemblages outside the ICE facility at the heart of Trump's attempt to pick a military fight with another American city, but they're not unlawful, and protests against Trump's policies are not a rebellion in a country with the First Amendment. 

A protestor in an inflatable frog suit stands in front of ICE agents and civilian police. The blue line the frog is standing behind separates a public sidewalk from the boundary of the ICE facility.

By contrast, this was what Los Angeles looked like in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was (legally) invoked by President George H.W. Bush at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson:

Of course, Trump may simply try to order the military into cities to claim some kind of optics victory regardless of the legality of it. ICE and other federal agencies have become much more aggressive in their response to Americans lawfully protesting their presence in recent weeks. They've also adopted much more violent tactics while (supposedly) detaining undocumented immigrants, in an apparent attempt to provoke unrest. 

It's important to note that it's not clear how much control or awareness Trump has over his own administration's actions. His confusion over whether he was seeing footage from Portland in 2025 or nationwide protests in 2020 was part of why the federal judge in Oregon barred his deployment in the first place. Trump's mention of the Insurrection Act today was brief and apparently a scripted talking point; he did not answer follow-up questions about it.

Why does this matter?

• Authoritarians cannot stand being mocked and will respond with as much force as possible to prevent it. 

• If there were an actual rebellion in Portland or any other American city, Trump wouldn't need to lie about it. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He* doubled down on his attempts to send troops to a city that he appears to genuinely believe is "burning."

Trump appeared in front of cameras for the first time since last Tuesday this morning, and immediately reiterated his false claim that Portland was overrun with "insurrectionists" who were terrorizing local officials into supporting them, and that the city was "burning to the ground," and that "all you have to do is look at the TV and read your newspapers."

Portland is not burning to the ground, but Trump "looking at the TV" appears to be part of the problem.

Trump became visibly confused last week when Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek gently pushed back on his claim that the city was burning. It became apparent he'd been watching TV coverage of the George Floyd protests five years ago, when there really was violence between protestors, counter-protestors, and police. Notably, a right-wing extremist set a Minneapolis police station on fire in an attempt to discredit protestors and escalate police violence against them.

Trump himself recounted the story of that call to reporters, describing how he plaintively asked, "Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?"

But regardless of whether he understands what is happening in Portland in the current year, Trump—or someone exercising power on his behalf—escalated federal agents' attacks on protestors outside of the Portland ICE compound last night, in an apparent attempt to provoke enough unrest to justify a military invasion of the city.

Meanwhile, Trump (or someone exercising his authority) also tried to make an end-run around yesterday's temporary restraining order prohibiting him from federalizing the Oregon National Guard and deploying them against Portlanders. California Gov. Gavin Newsom told the press this morning that previously federalized California National Guard troops were being redeployed today to Oregon.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents who cannot clearly and reliably understand what is happening around them should be removed from office, not used as a puppet for unelected officials. 

• Legal backflips don't change the fact that in a democracy, the military is not deployed against its own citizens in places where law and order are being maintained. 

• An authoritarian government that wants to fight its own people will usually find a way to make that happen.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got called "simply untethered to facts" by a federal judge he appointed.

It's not actually clear what, if anything, Donald Trump did today. He has, for the second month in a row, disappeared from all view of the public and press for five straight days—although the White House pool reporter believed she saw him once sitting inside another vehicle in his motorcade, in which case he is at least well enough to travel to and from his Virginia golf resort.

One thing that happened to him is that a federal judge, Karin Immergut, issued a ruling in which she granted city and state officials in Portland, Oregon a restraining order against his attempts to federalize the Oregon National Guard and deploy them against Americans inside that city. She wrote that even though presidents are entitled to enormous latitude where military matters are concerned, the law forbids them from this kind of domestic deployment except in cases of invasion or rebellion.

Immergut then examined Trump's various public statements calling Portland "war ravaged" and saying that "nobody's ever seen anything like" what is happening there, which in Trump's mind includes "crazy people" who "just burn the place down […] every night." None of this has actually happened. What is happening there is sporadic protest against one ICE facility, prominently featuring a man in a chicken suit. She concluded that Trump's assessment was "simply untethered to facts," no matter how generously interpreted, and so his planned invasion is unlawful.

The ruling sets a precedent that may hamper Trump's attempts to take over the Illinois National Guard and deploy it against Chicagoans, which he (or people using his authority) threatened to do this morning. Gov. J.B. Pritzker told reporters today about having received an ultimatum from Trump's Defense Department this morning.

Trump, or the people governing for him, are increasingly hostile towards the idea that courts should have any say whatsoever in holding him to the law. Before Immergut's ruling, Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller attacked the judicial system on social media, blaming "left-wing terrorism… shielded by far-left Democrat prosecutors, judges, and attorneys general." After the ruling, Miller attacked Immergut directly as party to an "organized terrorist attack" and retweeted a post saying she was "openly rebelling" against Trump's authority.

Immergut is a Trump appointee.

Why does this matter?

• There's a word for heads of state who don't have to be bound by the law or judiciary and it's not "president." 

• Presidents should not be so "untethered to the facts" that politically sympathetic judges have to call them out publicly for it. 

• Americans are not the enemy the American military fights, no matter how much Trump wants them to.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He canceled his own plans to defund anti-terrorism police that he only just now found out about.

This morning, the Trump administration signaled that it would reinstate $187M in cuts made by the Department of Homeland Security to federal anti-terrorism law enforcement for the state of New York, after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (accurately) accused the Trump administration of defunding the police.

This kind of budget back-and-forth is not very unusual. What is unusual is that Trump didn't know about it in the first place. As the New York Times reports:

It's important to note that in this case, the Department of Homeland Security was not deliberately keeping this information from Trump (although that kind of thing has happened repeatedly on his watch). The debate over the cuts was bitter and very public, with HHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Hochul trading blows over it in the newspapers. Trump, who spends a large portion of every day online, could easily have found out just by reading the news.

It's also quite possible that Trump had been properly informed and forgot—or that the information had been included in one of the briefings he famously refuses to read.

Trump himself did not comment on the matter today—or anything else, in a way that could be verified as coming from him. For the second month's end in a row, the normally camera-hungry Trump has disappeared completely from public view since Tuesday.

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point it doesn't matter if the president is clueless about important issues because he doesn't care, can't remember, or wasn't important enough to tell in the first place.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he'd use the shutdown to hurt Americans he doesn't like, just like he was told to by the Project 2025 people.

As has often been the case while Trump is president, the federal government is shut down due to a budget impasse in Congress—of which Trump's party controls both houses. His political strategy this time has been to gloat that a non-functioning government will somehow give him free rein to hurt Democrats and other Americans he considers his enemies, as he reiterated in a post to his private microblogging service this morning:

 

There are a few issues with this approach—beyond the part where Trump is openly embracing the core fascist principle that government's purpose is to reward the leader's supporters and punish his opponents. For one, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that this is yet another empty bluff. Mass firings ironically require a lot of worker hours, and sources say they're not happening in the relevant offices.

Another problem is that after the orgy of firings in Trump's first few months, in pursuit of "savings" that never came, the Trump administration has been quietly rehiring many of those same workers in order to bring essential government services back up to a bare minimum of functionality. In effect, Trump's Department of Government "Efficiency" has given thousands of federal employees what amounts to months-long paid vacations.

Trump's mention of Russell Vought and Project 2025 is interesting, too. When the ultra-conservative blueprints for a second Trump term were leaked during the 2024 campaign, the reaction from the public to its core ideas was extremely negative—so much so that Trump swore up and down he had nothing to do with its "bad ideas." It's not clear if anyone believed him at the time, given that 144 of his former White House staff and campaign officials worked on it and were reappointed in large numbers to the key positions they'd identified as central to Project 2025's goals when he returned to office. 

Much of Trump's second term has been characterized by how little direct control he seems to have over the day-to-day operations of his administration, which he's ceded to various power brokers including those Project 2025 alums. It's possible that Trump simply forgot he'd ever denied putting Vought's team in charge, but given how susceptible a Trump White House has been to palace intrigue over the years, it's also possible that Trump wasn't the actual author of the post acknowledging them.

As was the case under previous Trump shutdowns—all of which also involved full Republican control of Congress—the public overwhelmingly blames him.

Why does this matter?

• American government is of the people, by the people, for the people—not just the people Donald Trump thinks should get it. 

• Trump personally doesn't feel the effects of government shutdowns, but other Americans do. 

• Lying during political campaigns is one thing for a politician, but it's a bad sign if he can't remember the lies well enough to stay consistent.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He declared yet another bailout to fix yet another trade war farm crisis.

During his first term, Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods to an extent that had not been seen since the Great Depression. The result was reciprocal tariffs on American farm exports to China that immediately drove farms into bankruptcy and a shocking number of farmers to literal suicide. The only way to save the agricultural sector from that self-inflicted wound was a bailout, or rather three rounds of bailouts.

Trump's second term trade war is much bigger than the first, and its consequences are already even more severe for American agriculture. (Even Trump's own Agriculture Department acknowledges how bad it has gotten.) China has completely abandoned the American soybean market, and the corresponding glut is once again killing farms. That is forcing Trump to once again promise a farm bailout, which he did on his private microblogging site today:

The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for “negotiating” reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers. I WILL NEVER LET OUR FARMERS DOWN! Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t enforce our Agreement with China, where they were going to purchase Billions of Dollars of our Farm Product, but Soybeans, in particular. It’s all going to work out very well. I LOVE OUR PATRIOTS, AND EVERY FARMER IS EXACTLY THAT! I’ll be meeting with President Xi, of China, in four weeks, and Soybeans will be a major topic of discussion. MAKE SOYBEANS, AND OTHER ROW CROPS, GREAT AGAIN! 

In other words, what Trump is saying is that the money from the taxes American consumers are paying on Chinese goods will be used to bail out the farms that are failing because of those same taxes. 

And this is correct—instead of American farmers selling crops to China and making a profit that way, American consumers will pay extra taxes to bail out farmers whose crops are rotting in the fields or being sold for pennies on the dollar. (That is, assuming Trump actually gets around to paying the promised bailout funds in time to do some good, something he's struggled with in the past.) Bailouts are unpopular in general, but they're extremely unpopular with farmers, who make more money and more reliably when they can actually sell their crops.

Trump is also admitting, whether he realizes it or not, that China's pressure on him is working, and that Xi Jinping can force him to give up other concessions in exchange for giving him a political win on the "major topic of discussion." Trump, who appears to genuinely believe that he is a master negotiator, frequently struggles with basic concepts like "don't tell your opponent how they can most effectively pressure you." 

He's also had difficulty with "your opponent will act in their best interests, not yours" and "don't give things away for free" and "nobody will give you anything for free" and "don't expect your opponent to help you deceive your own side."

Why does this matter?

• A policy that costs tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to fix and cripples a major economic sector is a stupid policy. 

• Doing it a second time, except more so, is that much stupider. 

• Presidents who can't admit they made a mistake never learn from their mistakes, and presidents who can't learn aren't fit for office.