Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, Sep 29, 2025

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) left a meeting with President Donald J. Trump this afternoon without a deal to keep the government open past the last day of the fiscal year, which is tomorrow: Tuesday. The president and Vice President J.D. Vance appeared to consider opening up negotiations over extending the premium tax subsidies for healthcare insurance that will expire at the end of 2025 because of the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans passed in July, but they insisted the Democrats must fund the government before talks begin.

“We think when they say ‘later,’ they mean ‘never,” Schumer told reporters. He noted that Democrats had asked repeatedly for meetings about the measure and the Republicans refused, so Democrats had no input on the continuing resolution. Jeffries pointed out that far from being willing to work with Democrats, House Republicans have left town. “House Democrats are here,” he said. “Senate Democrats are here. The Senate is ready to act. House Republicans [are] on vacation right now…. They’re not serious about actually reaching a bipartisan agreement that meets the needs of the American people. If House Republicans were serious, they’d be here right now.”

Schumer told reporters that in their discussions, Trump did not appear to be aware that Americans are facing huge increases in their healthcare insurance payments because of the budget reconciliation bill.

Tonight, Trump’s social media account posted a deepfake video of Schumer and Jeffries speaking to reporters. In the doctored video, Schumer talks with Mexican music playing in the background, while Jeffries stands beside him wearing what appears to be a colorful Mexican sombrero and sporting a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up.

In the video, Schumer’s image is made to say: “There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullsh*t. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore, even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English, so they won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of sh*t, you know? At least for a while, until they learn English and they realize they hate us too.”

When Lawrence O’Donnell asked Jeffries to comment on the video, he responded: “It’s a disgusting video and we’re going to continue to make clear: bigotry will get you nowhere.”

Jeffries continued: “We are fighting to protect the healthcare of the American people in the face of an unprecedented Republican assault. On all the things, Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are closing our hospitals, nursing homes, and community-based health clinics, and have effectively shut down medical research in the United States of America. Clearly, Donald Trump and Republicans know that they have a very weak position, because they are hurting everyday Americans while continuing to reward their billionaire donors, just like they did in that one big, ugly bill with massive tax breaks. Democrats are united in the House and the Senate, and the point that we’ve made will continue to be clear. We are fighting to lower the high cost of healthcare, prevent these dramatically increased premiums, copays, and deductibles that will take place in a matter of days unless Republicans are willing to act in terms of renewing the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”

Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been leading the administration’s strikes on boats that the White House claims were smuggling drugs to the U.S., although it has offered no evidence of that claim either to lawmakers or to the public. Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times reported that “[i]n an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.”

Tomorrow is not only the last day of the fiscal year, it is also the date Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth set for what was to be his own highly unusual meeting with more than 800 military leaders and their senior enlisted advisors. Hegseth did not specify the purpose of the meeting. Since he called it hastily last week, news reports have suggested that he intended to talk to the generals and admirals about “soldier ethos.” Now Trump says he intends to go to the meeting himself and give the military leaders a pep talk.

We’ll see.

Noah Robertson, Tara Copp, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported today that eight current and former officials have told them there is a deep rift between the political appointees at the Pentagon and the military leaders there.

The journalists report that in a reordering of U.S. military priorities, Hegseth is withdrawing forces from Europe, reducing the concentration of power and consolidating commands abroad while focusing on using the military in the U.S. and neighboring countries. According to the reporters, General Dan Caine, Trump’s hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shares others’ concerns about the reworking of U.S. priorities.

Also tomorrow, as Michael Sainato of The Guardian reports, the resignations of more than 100,000 federal workers will take effect as part of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce. Those leaving say they were forced out through fear and pressure from administration officials, reminding Sainato of the comment from Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, who wants to destroy the modern government. Last October he said of federal workers: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down.… We want to put them in trauma.”

This year’s cuts to the government workforce will mean the loss of at least 275,000 workers, the largest decline in civilian federal employment in a single year since World War II.

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Notes:

https://www.democrats.senate.gov/news/press-releases/transcript-leader-schumer-remarks-and-qanda-at-press-conference-following-the-bipartisan-meeting-at-white-house-to-avoid-a-government-shutdown

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/29/white-house-shutdown-summit-fails-to-produce-a-deal-00585426

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/stephen-miller-venezuela-drug-boat-strike

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/world/americas/venezuela-mood.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/29/hegseth-national-defense-strategy-trump-dissent/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/26/politics/hegseth-generals-meeting-warrior-ethos

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/president-trump-administration-news-updates-today

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/28/us-mass-resignation-federal-workers

Bluesky:

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3lzzerqujmk25

Here is Heather Cox Richardson’s substack sit:

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/september-29-2025?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email