Here's what the White House website did to blame the shutdown on Democrats
Plus: How much U.K. taxpayers paid to change the color red in the U.S. flags for Trump’s state visit
The White House website has been updated to blame the government shutdown that began Wednesday on Democrats.
The official White House homepage was topped on Wednesday by a red, scrolling banner with the all-caps message “DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: DEMOCRATS’ [sic] IN THEIR OWN WORDS” along a countdown showing how long the shutdown has been going on. Users who clicked through were taken to a landing page with a livestreamed video of clips of Democratic lawmakers criticizing past shutdowns, integrating partisan messaging into its design.
With a news ticker, countdown clock, and clips of politicians speaking on Capitol Hill, this is web design inspired by one of President Donald Trump’s favorite pastimes: cable news. It’s just one way the Trump administration is hoping to shift blame about the shutdown away from Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and who a plurality of Americans think deserve the blame.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Tuesday found 38% of respondents blame Republicans for a shutdown, 31% blame both parties, 27% blame Democrats, and 4% blame neither.
Some federal agencies are finding ways to blame Democrats for the shutdown through official channels, too. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website added a pop-up and landing page messaging that says “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need” while the State Department’s website says “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.”
At the Small Business Administration (SBA), employees received language for a suggested out-of-office email that blamed Democrats, according to Wired.
“I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal spending bill (HR 5371), leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the US Small Business Administration from serving America’s 36 million small businesses. Every day that Senate Democrats continue [to] oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA-guaranteed funding,” the suggested email language read.
Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor of corporate law, says the White House website update isn’t a clear-cut violation of the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of federal employees, “unless the official statement mentions candidates, elections or campaign slogans,” though he says it may violate rules about lobbying.
“I do think, however, this is probably part of a coordinated executive branch campaign to lobby Congress, and thus this in combination with the agency web pages and emails probably violates statutory restrictions on use of taxpayer money to lobby Congress,” Painter tells me.
Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said while it’s not a Hatch Act violation, “agency employees are legally bound to provide nonpartisan service to their constituents.”
“A government shutdown causes stress for the public regardless of political affiliation; it is wildly inappropriate for agency leadership to politicize the situation and blame political enemies,” Sherman said.
Other government agencies have communicated the shutdown online without partisan messaging, like NASA, which has a banner that reads “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website.”
The White House took a far less neutral stance, though the website displayed toned-down rhetoric by Wednesday afternoon. The news ticker swapped out its messaging blaming Democrats for the shutdown with an update to watch the White House press briefing, during which Vice President J.D. Vance made a surprise cameo and said he doesn’t think the shutdown will be long.
After the briefing, whitehouse dot gov scrapped the news ticker. The countdown clock on the White House homepage reading “Democrats Have Shut Down The Government” above its top navigation, however, remains.
This story first appeared in Fast Company.
How much U.K. taxpayers paid to change the color red in the U.S. flags for Trump’s state visit
It had to be cherry red.
U.K. taxpayers paid the equivalent of about $67,000 to fix 66 hand-sewn U.S. flags because the Trump administration wanted a different color red ahead of Trump’s state visit there last month. That’s according to Nick Farley, whose company the Flag Consultancy provides flags for U.K. state events.
“The Americans decided that the red we use, which is called R01, wasn’t right for them, and that they wanted a cherry red instead, so we had to buy all new flags for this visit,” Farley told The Telegraph.
He said double checking flag colors with the visiting country is customary for state visits (“Before a state visit, we have to provide samples and go to the embassies in London to get sign-off. Countries find it insulting if we get our colours wrong,” he said.), but the story dropped the day before news that the director of the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library stepped down because the Trump administration wanted to gift King Charles with Eisenhower’s actual sword instead of the replica he ended up giving.
Cuomo just released an ad that uses A.I. in a way that’s kind of clever I guess
The new ad leans into the unreality of artificial intelligence by purposefully showing fake scenes.
I find myself to be somewhat of an A.I. pessimist these days (OpenAI is worth $500 billion and instead of a cure for cancer we have… an app that’s all slopfeed?! What exactly are we doing here? Please, touch grass and hug your loved ones instead.), but former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) mayoral campaign has found a novel use for the technology in its first ad of the general election campaign, titled “Day One.”
Cuomo says “I could pretend to do a lot of jobs,” followed by A.I.-generated scenes showing him working a bunch of only-in-New-York jobs, like as an MTA worker, Wall Street stock trader, Broadway stagehand, and Manhattan skyscraper window washer. The 30-second spot sports the disclaimer “This Political Communication Was Created With The Assistance Of Artificial Intelligence.”
“There are a lot of jobs I can’t do,” Cuomo says in the ad. “But I’m ready to be your mayor on day one.” The ad is meant to reinforce the experience argument Cuomo has emphasized since his campaign rebranded in August, and it uses A.I. in a creative way to show that. Polls taken last month before New York Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race show Cuomo trailing Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.
Have you seen this?
Zohran Mamdani’s sticker contest is the perfect kind of political engagement bait. Sticker contests are proven political gold. Mamdani’s, which resulted in some very good art, does not disappoint. [Fast Company]
Trump turns shutdown into weapon against blue America. The government shutdown is opening a new front in Donald Trump’s scorched-earth approach to power, with the president weaponizing the impasse to punish heavily-Democratic cities and states. [Politico]
Trump’s Louis XIV moment. Mr. Trump is showing the world that his presidency is a royal court where a select few are invited to pledge their allegiance. This is not the first time he has made such a gesture. When he paved over the Rose Garden, he created a Beltway Mar-a-Lago he could overlook from the balconies of the White House. Mr. Trump is refashioning the presidential residence into a palace; our democracy is now a members-only club. [Debbie Millman]
