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On this, the twenty-first day of the government shutdown, President Donald J. Trump invited all but one Republican senator to lunch today at what he calls the “Rose Garden Club,” a patio where the White House Rose Garden used to be. The missing senator was Rand Paul (R-KY), whose determination to cut the national debt has led him to vote consistently against measures that will increase it, including the Republican continuing resolution to fund the government.
Trump boasted that the shutdown was enabling the administration to cut funding for what he continues to say are Democratic priorities, although the executive branch has no legal power to stop appropriations for congressionally approved projects, and Republican voters will also be hurt by the administration’s attempts to cut public programs and infrastructure projects. Trump called out director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, calling him “Darth Vader” as he slashes through funding and fires government workers.
Jay O’Brien of ABC News reported this afternoon that a number of states are warning that they will not be able to continue to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits after November 1 unless the shutdown ends. SNAP serves about 42 million Americans and was already under pressure because the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act—cut about $186 billion out of the program over ten years. Now, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York have warned they cannot fund the program if the shutdown continues.
Meanwhile, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is refusing to call the House into session, keeping its members out of Washington, D.C., and thus continuing to jam the Senate into passing the House continuing resolution. As Mychael Schnell of MSNBC noted, keeping the House out of session also keeps members away from the congressional press corps, where the divisions in the Republican conference could go public.
Johnson also insists that keeping the House out of session is preventing him from swearing in representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was chosen by voters on September 23, although speakers have sworn in representatives during pro forma sessions in the past. Grijalva has said she will be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.
Today the state of Arizona and Grijalva sued the House of Representatives over Johnson’s refusal to swear Grijalva in, thus depriving her Arizona constituents of representation. Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes wrote: “This case is about whether someone duly elected to the House—who indisputably meets the constitutional qualifications of the office—may be denied her rightful office simply because the Speaker has decided to keep the House out of ‘regular session.’” Mayes has asked the court to authorize someone else to swear Grijalva into office.
Kate Riga and Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo note that the lawsuit addresses Johnson’s excuse for delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in by saying that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delayed the swearing-in of Representative Julia Letlow (R-VA) until about a month after her election. In fact, Pelosi contacted Letlow to see when she would like to be sworn in. “Ms. Grijalva would be delighted if Speaker Johnson would contact her to commit to a mutually agreeable time, as Speaker Pelosi did for Dr. Letlow,” the lawsuit notes.
Johnson called the lawsuit “absurd” and said it was “a publicity stunt.”
Meanwhile, Michael Stratford of Politico reported today that the United States has signed an “economic stabilization agreement” with Argentina’s central bank, offering extraordinary assistance to Argentina as its economy under Trump ally Javier Milei plummets. The agreement commits the U.S. to swapping $20 billion in currency to prop up the Argentine peso, in addition to at least two previous direct purchases of pesos.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has also said the government is arranging for private lenders or sovereign wealth funds to put another $20 billion into the Argentine economy. But, as Alexander Saeedy and Santiago Pérez of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, banks want security from the United States that they will get their money back if the Argentine economy continues to sink.
On Sunday, Trump suggested to reporters that the U.S. might also buy Argentine beef, saying such a purchase would help bring down prices in the U.S. But with Argentina having undercut U.S. soybean farmers in the Chinese market, U.S. cattle farmers met this suggestion with anger. As Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today, they say that their own herds are dwindling because of drought and the parasitic screwworm and that the government isn’t doing enough to address those problems.
Bessent claims that Argentina is a “systematically important ally” of the U.S., but as economist Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter last week, that importance is not economic. Unlike Mexico, which borders the U.S. and which accounted for 10% of U.S. exports when the U.S. stepped in to help stabilize its economy in 1994, Argentina is not geographically close and accounts for less than 0.5% of U.S. exports.
Argentina’s systematic importance to the administration is, as Krugman notes, both that the administration wants a Trump-like politician to succeed and apparently that some of Bessent’s hedge-fund billionaire associates invested heavily in Argentine bonds in a bet on Milei. Bailing out the government even for a short while will let them get their money out.
In contrast to the administration’s approach to Argentina, with its right-wing government, Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. would raise tariffs on Colombia and end funding to the country, although Jeff Mason, Andy Sullivan, and David Ljunggren of Reuters note that funding in the past primarily came from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has already shut down. Trump claimed that leftist Colombian president Gustavo Petro is “an illegal drug leader,” calling him “low rated and very unpopular.” He added that Petro “better close up” drug operations “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.” Trump complained that Petro has shown “a fresh mouth toward America.”
For his part, Petro posted on social media that “U.S. government officials have committed murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters.” He was referring to a September 16 strike by U.S. forces on a boat in the Caribbean that killed at least one Colombian national. “The United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman, and destroyed his family, his children,” Petro wrote. Yesterday, Colombia recalled its ambassador to the U.S.
Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reports that despite the shutdown, the administration has found $172 million to buy two Gulfstream private jets for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Homeland Security officials. The initial request of the department was for $50 million for a single new plane. The Department of Homeland Security called the new purchase “a matter of safety.”
Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. Now his own appointees will decide whether the American taxpayers should pay the compensation Trump wants.
When Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the demand tonight, Trump answered that media outlets had paid him settlements because “what they did was wrong. And, you know, when somebody does what’s wrong—now, with the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes a decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.”
The demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued today.
This afternoon, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) took the floor of the Senate to hold it through the night “to protest Trump’s grave threats to democracy.” He said: “We cannot pretend this is normal.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/us/politics/trump-justice-department-compensation.html
https://time.com/7327412/trump-government-shutdown-update-second-longest/
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5564292-republicans-oppose-trump-funding-cuts/
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/mike-johnson-shutdown-house-republicans-away-rcna238797
https://www.wsj.com/finance/argentina-bailout-banks-collateral-721bc2b5
https://apnews.com/article/beef-argentina-us-consumers-prices-f7fadbe1b3fef4646f9c3623f901209a
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/21/trump-argentina-deal-beef-imports-prices-us-cattle-industry.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/states-start-halting-snap-benefits-amid-shutdown/story?id=126716354
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/21/bessent-argentina-economic-deal-00616391