President Donald Trump is eating his words. A social media post he made on government shutdowns from 12 years ago and other resurfaced video clips have now come back to haunt him, and the internet isn’t letting him forget.
It’s especially relevant after Trump’s threat to fire workers in “Democrat agencies” over the shutdown and a bizarre AI-video he posted Thursday showing his Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought dressed as the “grim reaper.”
In 2013, Trump was still hosting “The Celebrity Apprentice” on NBC. Although he’s always been outspoken in his political views, he had not run for any office yet, but he had his opinions on government and wasn’t afraid to crow about them.
“A shutdown falls on the president’s lack of leadership. I mean problems start from the top and they have to get solved from the top. A shutdown means the president is weak,” Trump said in a post on Twitter, now X.
The internet was in full swing surfacing receipts to remind Trump of his own words, politicians jumped in the fray too.
Another surfaced video compiled by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Dems shows Trump repeatedly saying during interviews between 2011 and 2013 that the president is at fault and should be blamed for a government shutdown.
“You have to get everyone in a room. You have to be a leader,” he said back in 2013. In 2011 he said, “If there was a shutdown It would be a tremendous mark on the president of the United States.”
Trump’s resurfaced remarks was easy fodder for the public. “👏👏👏👏👏Get Trump out!! Impeach, Impeach, Impeach Trump NOW!!” remarked one on Instagram.
“Well that didn’t age well,” said one user while another added, “There’s always video.”
Fast-forward to 2025, and he’s presiding over the first government shutdown since 2018 and singing a completely different tune. Trump has spent the week blaming, badgering and outright lying about the closure as he and Republicans refuse to compromise with Democrats.
Then Trump posted a weird AI video of himself, Vice President JD Vance and Vought as the grim reaper set to the music of Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” He posted the video after threatening Democrats with firing thousands of furloughed workers if they don’t pass the GOP’s stopgap budget measure.
“This is what the president is doing while the government is shut down. We’re so screwed,” political commentator and social media influencer Harry Sisson posted on X and another post, “This is psyhco sic.”
“This guy is not okay,” another X user proclaimed and others agreed, “You must watch this, your President is mentally ill.”
“The most villain song and villainous setting ever,” this X user stated.
X user BigSavage responded with the old Trump Twitter post described above with the caption, “Imma Leave This Here.”
Thousands of federal workers have been off the job since Wednesday, and thousands more who are considered essential workers, such as members of the military and air traffic controllers, are working without pay as the government shutdown drags on.
Trump has politicized the stalemate between Democrats and Republicans and even went so far as to order workers at federal agencies to blame Dems for the closure in their email signatures, but Trump and Republicans control the government.
The Senate needs Democratic support to pass a stopgap measure to reopen the government.
But Democrats are demanding that the spending bill include protections for Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end, as well as undo the Medicaid cuts Trump and Republicans enacted in the budget bill rammed through over the summer without any bipartisan support.
The sweeping bill extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and pays for other administration priorities. But it does so by cutting more than $1 trillion from health programs in the largest such federal rollback in history.
