FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) laid down the law in a Thursday speech on Capitol Hill, debunking one of President Donald Trump's most brazen false claims he used as an excuse to cut off government funding talks with Democrats — and daring him to pick a shutdown fight rather than roll back cuts on public programs he himself swore to protect.
Specifically, Trump has claimed that the Democratic position is to mandate health care for unauthorized immigrants, which Jeffries emphasizes was never even on the table in the first place. Their only demand, he said, is to cancel upcoming cuts to existing health care programs.
"Donald Trump and Republicans are lying," said Jeffries. "Federal law currently prohibits health care funds being used for undocumented immigrants, period, full stop. And no one is asking for that law to be repealed."
"This shows you how desperate they are," Jeffries continued. "If Donald Trump really believed that he had a strong position here, then why did you back out of the meeting, bro? Why? I don't understand. Let's have this debate in front of the American people. And on our side of the debate, we're very clear. You promised, Donald Trump promised to love and cherish Medicaid. He said that in January of this year. And then they turned around, these extreme MAGA Republicans, and what did they do? They enacted the largest cut to Medicaid in American history."
"That's what the American people are facing right now," said Jeffries. "And that's what we're fighting hard to address: the Republican-manufactured-and-created health care crisis. And it's on all the things, including the Affordable Care Act, which is deeply popular with the American people. Medicaid, deeply popular with the American people. Medical research, deeply popular with the American people. Medicare, deeply popular with the American people. These are the things that we are fighting hard to protect. To fix our broken health care system. And to make sure that health care costs don't continue to skyrocket."
"In an environment where life is already too expensive because of Donald Trump, his Trump tariffs, the skyrocketing electricity costs, skyrocketing grocery costs, skyrocketing health care costs, skyrocketing housing costs, like the majority of the American people, the overwhelming majority of the American people know the country is headed in the wrong direction," he added. "Why would we continue to allow Donald Trump to engage in the same old thing? And so our message to him is simple, eight words, easy for him to understand: cancel the cuts, lower the costs, save healthcare."
Trump, for his part, is showing no signs of compromise and is also preparing to use the shutdown to further his plans of mass layoffs of the federal workforce.