Trump and the GOP Float a Great Idea to Get Annihilated in Virginia Elections

Virginia is a unique state for many reasons, but in the electoral context, its fortunes tend to go the way of the federal government, because so many people who live in Virginia work for the federal government. Simply doing the braindead GOP trope of ‘the government is bad and evil’ doesn’t work in a state where people pay their mortgage thanks to the federal government, which is currently shut down by the Republicans who control the government. It takes a little more nuance for Republicans to win Virginia elections, but they have proven they can do it and even had dreams of turning it red last year that don’t look that delusional in hindsight. But because these are the most shortsighted autocrats in human history who are completely deluded about how popular they actually are, they have floated a terrific idea that would certainly make Governor Abigail Spanberger and a larger Democratic majority in Virginia’s General Assembly a reality next year.

Johnson: “It’s true that in previous shutdowns, many or most furloughed employees have been paid for the time they were furloughed, but there is new legal analysis – I don’t know the details, I just saw a headline – but there are some legal analysts saying that might not be appropriate or necessary”

Most Popular

• Maybe It's Time for Jon Stewart to Step Back
• The Ten Likeliest Vice Presidents for Trump
• Top 5 Potential Democratic Presidential Nominees

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (October 7, 2025 at 8:20 AM

What the Speaker of the House is referring to is an illegal act by Office of Budget Management head Russell Vought, who deleted a reference to a law guaranteeing backpay to furloughed federal workers amidst a government shutdown. The goal of Republicans is to destroy the federal government, which thanks to the rules around the transitive property and the longstanding electoral understanding of how Virginia houses many federal workers, means that Republicans like Russell Vought are consciously throwing away next year’s very important Virginia elections. I know some of the doomers chime in every time the word election is thrown around, saying we’ll never have one again, but the doomers need to explain why the GOP would go through the trouble of trying to steal Congressional seats in Texas if that was the case. We will have elections next year, how unfair they will be is the question.

This entire Republican administration is the embodiment of As I wrote yesterday, these are fascists, but at their core they’re hyper online posters who live in a digital safe space, and they very clearly do not know how to do what they are trying to do.

Successful fascists throughout history have taken care of their armed services, they don’t willingly unleash stagflationary forces and slash some of the most popular programs in the country. Everything that Trump and these people do clearly operates from the premise that he has the popular support of a beloved King already, and it is forever November 2024.

But the dudebros who helped elect Trump blamed for a shutdown by the public, all while he exudes immense loser energy trying to convince them that the minority party with no power is actually doing all this. The GOP truly believes that they can just destroy the America everyone knew overnight and not have any backlash hit them, proving how their view of objective reality really has been completely poisoned by their propaganda machine. This move to piss off an extremely winnable electorate for the GOP by illegally stealing money from many of them is just another example of how we got extremely lucky with the most incompetent fascists that mankind has ever seen.