As we head into the third week of the “federal government shutdown”—an exceptionally stupid publicity stunt engineered by U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and cheered on by the Democrat Party’s wholly-owned subsidiaries in the mainstream media—we are veering into what U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson correctly deems “dark days” for government workers.
On the Salem Media news program THIS WEEK ON CAPITOL HILL with Tony Perkins, Speaker Johnson zeroes in on the people being harmed the most by Schumer’s cynical preening before the TV cameras. This moment in our history is most harmful, in Johnson’s words, “certainly for our federal workers and contractors and people like our troops and Border Patrol officers and TSA agents and air traffic controllers. Because Democrats in the Senate have now voted for the 11th time to keep the government closed.”
Speaker Johnson adds that “to add insult to injury, on Thursday, they even voted to reject a standalone bill to fund our nation’s defense and pay our troops. This is absolutely outrageous.”
Of course, for weeks now, Washington insiders knew there would be zero progress on ending the shutdown until this weekend’s second round of silly “No Kings” rallies around America. One sage observer told me personally a week ago that Schumer won’t fold until after he gets to lumber onstage and bellow like a banshee before throngs of union-organized malcontents that—in his increasingly crude recent outbursts—“there is no f**king way we will ever surrender to Donald Trump!”
Two problems with Schumer’s ersatz pottymouth bravado. First, the only reason—literally the only one—America has been saddled with this shutdown, which is costing Americans and our national economy over $1.5-billion a day, is so Schumer can pretend to be a tough guy rather than the slowly deflating truck tire he actually is. It is all designed to stave off a 2026 Democratic Senate primary challenge back home in New York from Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (the onetime bartender who this week declared that the water in Delaware was contaminated by toxic chemicals pumped into it by “corporations like Deloitte.” (That must have come as a major surprise to corporate leaders at Deloitte…which is a top accounting firm which has no chemicals to pump in water anywhere. )
The second reason Schumer will surrender is that by next Monday, the 2600 planned “No Kings” rallies will be totally forgotten except for the piles of trash left behind for…you guessed it…government workers to clean up. Chuck will have had his moment in the spotlight…so then he’ll cave.
All of this could have been avoided—and sanity on Capitol Hill restored much more quickly—if not for the cheerleading and promotion of the past 10 days by America’s linear equivalent of the Al-Jazeera network…MSNBC…egging on Schumer and organizers of “No Kings.” Unions like the radical American Federation of Teachers and the SEIU are like little kids jumping up and down in the background of local TV reporters doing standups at gang shootings; they crave the cheap publicity almost as much as they hate President Trump.
Giddy MSNBC “anchors” like Rachel Maddow, Michael Steele, and the ratty-looking weekend host Alex Witt, who has been popping up all week, have been breathlessly reporting on the “massive” rallies supposedly taking place.
Even Lawrence “The Prince of Darkness” O’Donnell and his distaff counterpart Nicolle Wallace could not hide their churlish delight that “No Kings” will supposedly be a political black-eye for President Donald J. Trump, only days after he stunned the world by negotiating a historic peace agreement between Israel and the vile Hamas terrorists who launched the now-infamous October 7th attacks.
Like carefully choreographed Busby Berkley musicals from the Depression era 1930s, MSNBC’s “stars” listed above have been augmented all this week by such B-team bit players as notorious race baiter Rev. Al Sharpton and John Heilman, best known as a barnacle on many MSNBC panel shows…always with a sophomoric, negative spin on anything Donald Trump says or does. (This is the same collection of carnival sideshow attractions whose solid record includes hyping—right up until their “poignant” concession statements—Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory in 2016 and the “historic” 107-day campaign of the buffoonish Kamala Harris.)
We can’t stop the “No Kings” rallies…which will be populated by mostly unhinged people like the woman on X that someone shared with me: an unbalanced kook wearing peace symbol earrings and spewing a nonstop stream of on-camera swearing—literally every other utterance being the F-word that Chuck Schumer is now fond of shouting—about the need to “arrest” Donald Trump and throw him in jail, etc. etc. (Personally, if I were related to this lady, I would change my name and be applying right now for asylum in Mexico rather than admit it.)
But we can each exercise one of the greatest inventions ever devised by electronic engineers in America: the “OFF” switch that blocks MSNBC from coming into our homes. I used to be mildly amused by their rantings—almost like the Bizarro World in DC’s “Superman” comics, where up is down, wrong is right, and everything is the opposite of reality. But now, as actual financial damage is being inflicted on our troops, air traffic controllers and our national economy because MSNBC continues to cheer on Chuck Schumer acting like a total jackass and keeping the government shut, it ceases to be funny. Time to tune it out, for good.
If MSNBC falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Nope. Time for this national embarrassment to end…one household at a time.
Tom Tradup is Vice President of News and Talk Programming at the Salem Radio Network. He can be reached at ttradup@srnradio.com