Schumer shutdown holds funding hostage — but Trump seizes opportunity to trim bureaucratic fat



Republican lawmakers have referred to the government closure as the “Schumer shutdown,” blaming Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for directing his fellow Democrats to oppose the clean continuing resolution that would have temporarily extended funding.

'He’s afraid of his own party.'

Majority Leader Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) shared his comments about the shutdown on Thursday, arguing Democrats had taken the CR hostage.

“I don’t know that there’s a lot to negotiate,” Thune told NBC News.

“I don’t think you can keep this hostage. As soon as they release the hostage, then we can talk about those other issues.”

When asked whether Democrat lawmakers were “forcing Senator Schumer’s hand,” Thune responded, “Sure they are.”

“He’s under a tremendous amount of pressure. The far-left activist base in his party is what’s driving this, and they want to fight with the president,” Thune continued.

“They picked this hostage. I don’t think it’s a smart one, and I think it undermines what they’re trying to accomplish in the long run.”

RELATED: Trump’s MASTER PLAN to ensure shutdown spells DOOMSDAY for Democrats

Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

During a Thursday episode of “Blaze News: The Mandate,” Blaze Media senior politics editor and Washington, D.C., correspondent Christopher Bedford speculated that Schumer is afraid of a primary from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“He’s afraid of his own party,” Bedford said. “And it’s people like her that threaten him.”

— (@)

He emphasized the importance of understanding government.

“It’s fine to be AOC and a rock-thrower on the outside. It’s fine to be some of the back-benchers in the GOP, who just want to throw rocks and don’t want to get along with people and don’t understand why they can’t get their way. But at the end of the day, it’s the people who really understand how to wield power and how to use power, which is what’s differentiated this Republican administration from previous ones,” Bedford said.

He explained that those in this Trump administration “actually know how the mechanisms of the bureaucracy work.”

RELATED: Russell Vought’s quiet war on big government

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Vice President JD Vance. Photographer: Annabelle Gordon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is “working diligently” to slash government bureaucracy amid the shutdown.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Thursday morning.

Trump called on Republicans to use the shutdown as an opportunity to “clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud.”

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🚨REVEALED: How Biden's FBI was Targeting Charlie Kirk's TPUSA!
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🚨REVEALED: How Biden's FBI was Targeting Charlie Kirk's TPUSA!

‘Trump next please’: Democrats on Bluesky call for MORE political violence



If you used the Bluesky app in the past couple of days, it would be hard not to notice just how bloodthirsty the Democratic Party has become — especially in the wake of the assassination of the right’s beloved Charlie Kirk.

One trend on the social media app has taken BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson by surprise.

“There are a ton of crazies over there,” Savage says on “Blaze News: The Mandate.” “I am not on there, but they are basically saying, ‘Who’s next for all of this?’”

Leftists have been posting who they hope falls victim to the same fate as Charlie Kirk.


The most repeated names on this list include President Trump, J.K. Rowling, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Libs of TikTok, and Elon Musk.

“Charlie Kirk is dead (and has been for a few hours), Trump next please,” one user wrote on the left’s version of X.

“Unfortunately, this is what we will have to continue to deal with,” Savage says.

Blaze Media D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford is also completely disturbed.

“The threats are real. The copycats are going to happen,” Bedford says.

“This really is a point where we can decide that we’re going to get better, or we can decide that we’re going to get much worse, much more quickly. And it’s going to take a serious turn by society, a serious rejection by the American left, by the universities — not just these businesses and these sports teams, but by the university system — of this kind of crap in order for this to actually have any kind of impact,” he explains.

“There needs to be significantly more accountability than there is right now. And funds need to be taken,” he continues. “And all these nonprofits that for the last five years have spent time funneling money towards bail funds for rioters, towards printing T-shirts that have guns on them with the trans flag that says ‘defend it’ ... these people who fund groups that are professional agitators — well, those funds need to be ceased, and those boards of directors need to be investigated. These are crimes.”

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Our inspiring statesman: The Charlie Kirk legacy



Charlie Kirk was only 31 years old when he was taken from this Earth, but his time here has undoubtedly left a lasting imprint on not just the nation’s youth — whom he was dedicated to reaching — but all Americans.

Blaze News editor in chief and BlazeTV host Matthew Peterson, BlazeTV host Jill Savage, and Blaze Media Washington correspondent Christopher Bedford are devastated by the tragic loss.

“Charlie Kirk built an organization and helped build a movement that ultimately propelled him to the very heights of American politics,” Peterson says on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“And what we saw today was unspeakable evil, really, a political assassination of someone who was a political leader. This was someone who is a bright light, who I first met at the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowships,” he continues.

But Charlie wasn’t your average leader.



“Famously, Charlie didn’t go to college. Incredibly smart guy. He sought out wisdom. He sought out knowledge. He was a very sharp student, and he constantly adjusted and changed when he learned new things or saw new things as he was building and helping to make America great,” Peterson says.

“He was an incredible, incredible human being who never stopped doing, who never stopped learning, and who never stopped building,” he says, adding, “And ultimately I think that what he wanted to be was a statesman. ... This is what he wanted to become: an American statesman who changed things for the good. And that is what he did.”

Bedford agrees, though he notes that there was “a strange side” of Charlie that he “didn’t expect.”

“Sweetness. Humility, which really surprised me. Soft-spoken, kind. He had taken personal interests in people. You knew him through Claremont. I knew him through some hunting and fishing trips that our late friend Foster Friess put together and then later on through podcasts and events,” he explains.

While Bedford recalls that the events were “big, glitzy, glamorous, shiny, light-filled things with all kinds of celebrities,” he says Charlie “was not like that.”

“Not in person. Someone who’s married, someone with two children,” he says.

And Bedford has noticed that Charlie’s passing has stirred something in Americans, regardless of how political they are.

“One woman I know, who’s not — she just follows politics tangentially, one of my friends’ wives, she texted me and said, ‘I’m feeling really delicate right now. Not delicate like a flower, delicate like a bomb,’” he says.

“They’ve just killed a cultural figure,” he continues. “Not a politician, not a businessman, but a cultural figure who touched a lot of lives and was in a lot of living rooms with people and was on their personal devices and was on their Instagram feeds and TikToks and came into their classrooms and talked to them on campus and touched a lot of people.”

Peterson couldn’t agree more with Bedford’s friend’s wife, commenting, “Delicate like a bomb is right.”

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DC Democrat slams crime laws turning Washington into a war zone



Denise Rucker Krepp may be a former Obama appointee and lifelong Democrat, but that’s not stopping her from calling out D.C.’s devastating crime policies.

Krepp blames the D.C. Council for redefining “juveniles” to include offenders up to age 24, undermining accountability and fueling carjackings, shootings, and lawlessness across the city.

“When I was a kid, a juvenile was somebody under the age of 18 ... but according to the D.C. Council, a juvenile is somebody under the age of 24,” Krepp tells Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“I mean, a 24-year-old man is a man, not a juvenile. And if you tell a 24-year-old that if they commit armed carjacking and they won’t be held fully accountable, then what do you think’s going to happen?” she continues.


“At the age of 24, some of my best friends were 24-year-olds. They were two years out of the Marine Corps already,” Bedford agrees.

Krepp recalls confronting the Ward 6 Councilman Charles Allen, saying, “Charles, what are you doing, dude?”

“He just blew me off and he said, ‘Denise, I know what I’m doing.’ Okay, you definitely knew what you were doing. You pretty much invited President Trump to come in and bring the National Guard in to solve your problem, which you created,” Krepp says.

“He kind of seems like the left-wing leader of the D.C. city council, or one of the most vocal champions of some of these causes,” Bedford says.

He notes that “there was enough anger” among Democrats that there was a recall petition for Allen — but it failed.

“I think it failed because people looked at the recall effort and said it was funded by Republicans. And I, you know, when people said that, I laughed. I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It wasn’t funded by Republicans. It was funded by Democrats. It was Democrats telling Charles Allen that what he was doing was unacceptable,” Krepp says.

“Unfortunately, the majority of Democrats did not agree with that,” she adds.

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Can Ghislaine Maxwell finally blow the lid off the Epstein files?



Just weeks ago, Americans were told that the case was closed on Jeffrey Epstein, but in a dramatic turn, Ghislaine Maxwell may be taking the stand to testify.

“Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: What do you know? At @AGPamBondi's direction, I’ve contacted her counsel. I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law — and no lead is off limits,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a post on X.

The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell over the Epstein files, and her lawyer has publicly stated in response to the news that she will “always testify truthfully.”

“She’s going to name names,” senior editor for politics and Washington correspondent for Blaze Media Christopher Bedford tells BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”


“The question is, what evidence could be provided for actual prosecutions? Which is always a risk now that the administration faces,” he continues, noting that the “thing about Maxwell” is that “she’s got no dog in this fight.”

“She could be interested in chaos. She could be interested in hurting Donald Trump. She could be interested in helping the cause for truth. Maybe she’s had just a huge turnaround in prison,” he adds.

While Bedford believes her motivations will be “entirely out for herself,” the end result will likely be that she’s going to “hand over names” because she was never offered a plea deal in the first place and might try to get a lesser sentence.

“And here’s the risk in general of the client list,” Bedford says. “The list of people who went to the island is broad. The list of people who went to the island includes artisans, includes workers, includes staff. And then you’re going to have the whole question of, well, a 16-year-old girl who refuses to go on the record and refuses to press charges.”

“We could find some great stuff here. I think we will,” he continues. “But is it going to tidy up the administration’s mess? That’s a different question entirely.”

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JD Vance EXPOSES the real coalition behind Zohran Mamdani



New York City just took a sharp left turn, voting for Muslim communist Zohran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.

And in a recent speech to conservative insiders, Vice President JD Vance succinctly explained how this happened — and why it signals a dangerous new phase for the American left.

“A 33-year-old communist, running an insurgent campaign, beat a multimillion-dollar establishment machine politician in the New York Democratic mayoral primary,” Vance said, noting that his win drove home “just how much the voters in each of the respective parties have changed.”

"If President Trump's victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad, working- and middle-class coalition, Mamdani's coalition is almost the inverse of that," he continued, explaining that his voters reflect “a left that has completely left behind the broad middle of the United States of America.”


“This is a guy who won high-income and college educated New Yorkers ... but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree. That’s an interesting coalition. Maybe it works in the New York Democratic primary. I don’t think it works particularly well in the United States at large,” he added.

Vance then called Mamdani’s voters “the party of highly educated but downwardly mobile elites.”

Blaze media senior politics editor and DC correspondent Christopher Bedford is impressed by Vance’s analysis.

“It was so spot-on,” Bedford tells BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on "Blaze News: The Mandate." “A lot of what drives and unites them, if anything unites them much any more, is mutual loathing.”

“This is a coalition that’s not even largely driven by values. The working-class values, the green values, have gone by the wayside,” he continues, noting that their view of the world has become very observably bleak, as demonstrated by their response to the floods in Texas.

“A literal children’s doctor in Houston, Texas, earlier today posted on Facebook about how these children who were washed away from a girls' Christian summer camp, from all ethnicities by the way, deserved it, because of the way their parents voted,” he explains.

“That is hate. That is pure, pure hate,” he adds.

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Rogue anti-Trump judges obliterated by SCOTUS' landmark ruling



The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling limiting nationwide injunctions has been hailed as a massive win for common sense after 40 such orders — 62% against Donald Trump.

And no one’s happier about it than the president himself.

“It took the court system out of the presidency to a large extent. The courts were almost like being the president, and you can’t have it. It was such a big decision. This is one of the biggest decisions, where you would have a local federal judge who was radical left determining the policy for the whole nation,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News, adding, “And now they can’t do that.”

“There’s been a weird reading of what an injunction is able to do that we’ve been witness to for the first Trump administration and now the beginning of the second where a lawyer can represent all people, not just the plaintiff, not just the aggrieved,” Blaze Media D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford tells Blaze TV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”


“We had a judge in Hawaii who was deciding what federal immigration policy was,” he continues. “And that is, thankfully, over.”

“Of course, there will be more tactics that are used, but that is a really essential one,” he adds, noting that one of his favorite things about the ruling was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s baseless dissent.

“Ketanji Brown Jackson — the judge who wrote the dissenting opinion for the Democrats, the one who wore a voodoo necklace to the State of the Union, just an interesting character all around — basically cited legal law that didn’t exist,” Bedford explains.

“[She] tried to say that this is a dictatorship. Just sounded much more like a Democratic activist who hadn’t actually done all of the necessary research or the readings,” he adds.

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Abortions are going up thanks to THIS leftist loophole



In the background of the Supreme Court ruling that has given states the power to block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics is President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which could hit the clinics even harder.

The bill includes language that would ban insurance plans offered under the Affordable Care Act from covering abortion care in certain states.

“I’m still optimistic that this will remain in the bill. There’s too much political support behind it, primarily from the American people, by the way,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, tells BlazeTV host Jill Savage and Blaze media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“Over 60% of Americans do not want tax dollars going towards funding abortion procedures,” he explains, adding, “I think Donald Trump has shown Republicans how to fight back in the culture war and how to win.”


“There’s been some good progress. We are cutting back taxpayer funding in the red states for abortions, we are restricting it, we are passing common-sense laws like in Texas and in Florida. Texas has a great law; it’s a heartbeat law, and they’ve essentially eliminated all of abortions,” he continues.

However, after the overturn of Roe v. Wade three years ago, abortions have gone up by 10% across America.

“What’s causing that is the blue states have passed what’s known as shield laws that allow them to recruit and advertise for abortion services in the red states and the border states,” Schilling explains. “It also allows their pharmaceutical companies and their doctors to mail out abortion drugs to the red states.”

“I do hope that in the future, we will bring more attention to the fact that these blue states have weaponized their laws to make sure that we’re aborting more babies,” he adds.

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Trump’s rising poll numbers amid LA unrest revealed



The protests across the nation concerning Trump’s deportations have everyone’s heads on a swivel, but while the leftist-run media tries to paint Trump as an evil dictator, his poll numbers are going up.

Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows believes Trump is on the right path and that the left has miscalculated his support.

“The men and women who serve in ICE and Border Patrol, they’re having none of it. They’ve got a president who has their back, they have the president’s back, and the American people will see the difference,” Meadows says on “Blaze News I The Mandate.”

“Elections have consequences,” BlazeTV host Jill Savage agrees. “This is what the American people voted for, this was one of the very central issues of the Trump campaign, and now they’re going out and trying to execute the plan that the American people voted for.”


And while the left tries to find allies in immigrants who are here legally, what it's actually finding is that legal immigrants don’t want criminals here either.

“And what’s happening to President Trump’s poll numbers among those who have come here as immigrants is going way up, but not just for those who say, ‘I want to secure the border.’ It’s the people who have come here legally and said, ‘Listen, we need to control the border,’” Meadows says.

“And that’s been the surprising thing, I think, to the left. They’re starting to say, ‘How in the world are his numbers going up?’” he adds.

Blaze Media D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford notes that this is a typical line of Democrat thinking — that all people who don’t look like their imagined version of a Trump supporter must not think like one either.

“The Democrats have really tried to typecast different groups into one homogeneous thing, whether it’s immigrants and illegal immigrants, that’s all one voting bloc. They don’t realize that illegal immigrants come and they commit crimes in communities where a lot of legal immigrants actually live,” Bedford says.

“Or they assumed that Hispanic workers and immigrants would rise during Black Lives Matter, but those were two distinct groups with distinct missions,” he adds. “Their reads on everyone seem to be incorrect.”

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