Shutdown Trump Officials Coming to Work in Pajamas

Omnishambles

On this week’s episode of Omnishambles, host Jackie Kucinich welcomes The Daily Beast’s national-security reporter Erin Banco, as well as White House and Trumpworld reporter Asawin Suebsaeng. Erin breaks down the latest Donald Trump-Russia bombshells that detonated over the president's snowed-in weekend, and also offers up listeners a new, hot scoop: the ongoing government shutdown has led the Pompeo-era State Department officials to come into work to do little more than clean their offices—while literally still wearing their pajamas.

Jackie and Swin also discuss their reporting on the latest shutdown bedlam self-inflicted by Trump and his team, including a scene from Friday morning (a particularly perfect metaphor for the state of play...) in which senior White House official Mercedes Schlapp urges Republicans on Capitol Hill to rebut Democratic chatter that a Trump national-emergency declaration is imminent—even though she conceded on the call that Trump's own senior staffers had no idea if such a declaration was imminent or not.

Swin and Jackie also dig in on the racist rhetoric—and policy proposals—of Rep. Steve King, and how President Trump talks about the far-right, anti-immigrant congressman when he's not around.

"Trump's immigration policy is basically in line with what Steve King has been pushing since the early 2000s," Jackie says.

"He used to wheel...out a model of the wall, and have little barbed wire that he would lace through, and he would build it on the [House] floor," Jackie recounted of when she used to cover Rep. King years before Trumpism came along.