Trump officials can't hide 'collective grin' over inflicting pain on Americans: columnist

House and Senate Republicans may agonize over the pain inflicted by the ongoing government shutdown, but MSNBC opinion writer Hayes Brown said there’s no hiding the glee from the White House.

President Donald Trump administration’s latest proposal to inflict agony on furloughed federal workers during the shutdown includes a call for them to not receive back pay once funding is restored. This new proposal by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) comes on the heels of an earlier administration threat from OMB Director Russell Vought that the shutdown should herald new mass layoffs of federal employees.

“Congressional Republicans clucked their tongues and shook their heads sanguinely at this latest White House overreach, insisting that they had no power to block Vought from undertaking such an unpleasant task,” wrote Brown. “‘Russ does this reluctantly,’ House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unconvincingly insisted last week. ‘He takes no pleasure in this.’”

Brown also cited Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) trying to claim Democrats are to blame for the Trump administration’s policies by “handing the keys to Russ Vought.”

“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Thune told Politico.

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has been “hitting all the usual political notes for a shutdown,” said Brown, by warning Monday that food benefits programs for families in need and new mothers would soon run out of money if Senate Democrats don’t yield.

“It’s exactly the kind of spotlight on the victims of a shutdown that usually sours public opinion against its instigators, said Brown, “… But the good cop/bad cop routine underway falls flat when you stop to consider what Vought would be up to even if the shutdown had been averted.”

Brown points out that Vought is “extremely transparent” about his motivation to use any excuse available to massively shrink the federal workforce. Additionally, Trump’s claims that any government shutdown necessitates layoffs “are blatantly false,” Brown adds. “The shutdown only provides the flimsiest pretext to continue doing what would be on the docket anyway.”

Leavitt’s attempt to blame Democrats for cuts to food programs also “rings hollow when you consider how much of a chunk Republicans already slashed from the food security safety net in their so-called big, beautiful bill earlier this year,” said Brown. “In failing to provide any funding for the programs at all, the shutdown merely takes the GOP’s default position on those benefits … to its logical endpoint.”

Brown said Republicans are generally ill-suited to argue the shortcoming of a shutdown considering their love of shutting down government in past decades.

“MAGA adherents are particularly poor messengers, many of them having gotten their political start in the tea party-fueled shutdown era from the early 2010s,” said Brown. “These rampant contradictions may help explain why … Democrats aren’t seeing the normal fallout for their hardline stance against reopening the government.”

“It’d be a tough sell for the White House even without the difficulty the administration is having from hiding its collective grin,” he added.

Read Brown's full MSNBC column at this link.