Trump live updates: Government shutdown looms as Democrats won’t support Republican spending bill

Reporter Brian Glenn, the partner of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, got a pretty cheap laugh yesterday when he asked Martin: “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland?!

“I think she is going to lower your happiness levels!”

“I like that question!” Trump chuckled.

Here’s more from Justin Baragona.

I’m not sure this is how they see it in Dublin, to put it mildly.

Elsewhere during the president’s pre-St Patrick’s Day sitdown with Martin, Trump hinted about serving for an unconstitutional third term in the White House when he told his opposite number he hopes to celebrate the occasion with him “at least three more times.”

“Taoiseach, I want to just thank you once again for being here, it’s an honor, and hopefully we’re gonna be doing this at least three more times, OK. We’re gonna be doing this three more times, at least,” the president said at a “Friends of Ireland” lunch at the Capitol.

“When I say ‘at least’ they go absolutely crazy,” Trump added, referring to the press, drawing laughs in the room.

“So thank you very much for being here.”

Here he is mangling the pronunciation of “Taoiseach”, inevitably.

Hours after Trump’s odd personal broadside against him, Schumer said that Senate Democrats could not support the Republican spending bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this week as a government shutdown looms.

Here are his remarks in full:

“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort.

“But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution (CR) without any input, any input, from Congressional Democrats.

“Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.

Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass.

“We should vote on that.

“I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.”

Here’s Eric Garcia on whether Schumer’s side could yet be forced to cave in and pass the resolution for the greater good.

Donald Trump launched into a bizarre attack on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – the highest-ranking Jewish person in the American government – by inexplicably claiming that the New York Democrat was no longer Jewish during a marathon media event alongside Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin on Wednesday.

Trump was speaking to reporters in the Oval Office about his plans for tax cuts when he suddenly pivoted to recounting how, in his view, Democrats hadn’t stood up and applauded sufficiently at different parts of the speech he delivered to a joint session of Congress last week.

“We are planning to lower taxes… if the Democrats behave, but the Democrats have no clue – you saw that the other night during the speech,” he said.

“That evening was a disaster for the Democrats, in my opinion.”

Then, for no apparent reason, the president pivoted to attacking the background of Schumer, a fellow New Yorker and a longtime foil during his decade-long political career.

“And Schumer is a Palestinian, as far as I’m concerned. You know, he’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.”

Schumer, a 74-year-old veteran of the upper chamber who has served as the Democratic floor leader since 2017, is not Palestinian.

He was born in Brooklyn and has lived in New York for his entire life.

Here’s Andrew Feinberg’s report.

Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has made the surprising claim that the president has recently lost 30 pounds – while conceding that his junk food diet still leaves a lot to be desired.

Interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity in a branch of Steak ’n Shake in Florida on Tuesday, Kennedy said of Trump: “I saw him yesterday and I think he’s lost 30 pounds.”

“All of my agencies advise against vaccination of birds, because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine, in other words a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease, you turn those flocks into mutation factories,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “They’re teaching the organism how to mutate.”

But, vaccines could be key to the administration’s response going forward — at least, according to the Department of Agriculture

The acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he doesn’t know exactly what the “DOGE kids” have been doing with Americans’ sensitive data, according to a bombshell audio recording.

An hour-long meeting last week led by the department’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, was captured on an audio recording shared with ProPublica, where he repeatedly referred to young staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency as the “DOGE kids,” and confirmed they had “broad access” to Social Security numbers and personal data.

Addressing what DOGE staffers had been doing with Social Security data, Dudek reportedly asked at one point in the meeting: “Are we going to break something? I don’t know.”

Steve Bannon loves talking. In fact, he can’t stop. The Trump whisperer has laid out a plan behind the abandonment of Ukraine, namely for the United States to make a deal with Russia and turn to its real enemy, China. While Beltway think-tankers apply their fine minds to the puzzle of the Trump administration’s diplomacy, Bannon has cheerfully taken to the airwaves, most recently on the podcast of Tim Dillon, a stand-up comedian, to explain it to the little guy.