By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Party leaders in Congress have long criticized government shutdowns as toxic and destructive.

“Always a bad idea,” former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of shutdowns in 2024. A potential “disaster,” Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said of the shutdown the country narrowly avoided when he voted with Republicans to keep the government open in March.

“I don’t think shutdowns benefit anybody, least of all the American people,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said last week.

Related Articles

With scant information, federal workers brace for possible shutdown

Trump’s comments on autism evoke anger and hope among autistic people and their families

Trump to meet Monday with top four congressional leaders as government shutdown risk looms

A broad wave of firings followed Charlie Kirk’s assassination

Trump’s trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

Yet Congress often finds itself at the brink of one as the two major political parties’ differences grow more intractable with each passing year. Democrats are threatening to vote against keeping the government open on Oct. 1.

Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., say they won’t budge unless Republicans immediately extend health care subsidies that expire at the end of the year, among other demands. Republicans say they don’t want to add any complicated policy to their “clean” stopgap bill to keep the government open for the next seven weeks.

Time and time again, lawmakers hold out until just before the deadline and negotiate a last-minute compromise. But this time Democrats see some potential political advantages to a shutdown with their base voters spoiling for a fight.

History shows the tactic almost never works, and federal employees are caught in the middle. The White House has already laid out a plan to potentially lay off hundreds, if not thousands, of federal employees — a significant escalation from previous shutdowns in which federal workers were temporarily furloughed and given back pay when the standoff ended.

A look at some previous shutdowns and how they ended:

December 2018- January 2019

Two years into his first term, President Donald Trump led the country into its longest shutdown ever with demands that Congress give him money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Similar to Republican leaders today, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, refused to negotiate unless Trump, a Republican, allowed the government to reopen. Democrats had won the House majority in the 2018 election and took power in the middle of the partial shutdown.

FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., center, accompanied by from left, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Md., Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., and others, signs a deal to reopen the government on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Trump retreated after 35 days as intensifying delays at the nation’s airports and another missed payday for hundreds of thousands of federal workers brought new urgency to efforts to resolve the standoff.

January 2018

The government shut down for three days as Democrats insisted that any budget measure come with protections for young immigrants known as “Dreamers.” Trump refused to negotiate until the government reopened, and the weekend shutdown ended after McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, promised a vote on the issue.

Democrats, led by Schumer, tried to lay blame on Trump. But Republicans said that it was Democrats who “caved” in the end.

October 2013

The hard-right tea party faction of House Republicans, urged on by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, shut the government down for 16 days as they demanded that language to block implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law be added to a spending bill.

FILE – Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, second left, is followed by reporters on Capitol Hill, Oct. 16, 2013, in Washington, as time grows short for Congress to prevent a threatened Treasury default and stop a partial government shutdown. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

The conflict escalated when House Republicans also blocked the needed approval for raising the amount of money the Treasury can borrow to pay U.S. bills, raising the specter of a catastrophic default. Obama, a Democrat, vowed repeatedly not to pay a “ransom” to get Congress to pass normally routine legislation.

Bipartisan negotiations in the Senate finally ended the shutdown, and Republicans did not win any major concessions on health care. “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win,” then-House Speaker John Boehner conceded.

December 1995-January 1996

Intent on slashing the budget, Republicans led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich forced a three-week shutdown from December 1995 to January 1996 in a bid to coerce President Bill Clinton to sign onto a balanced budget agreement. Republicans were saddled with the blame, and Clinton, a Democrat, was reelected that November.

FILE – President Bill Clinton, center, meets with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., left, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R- Kansas, to grapple with competing balanced budget plans, Dec. 31, 1995, at the White House in Washington (AP Photo/Greg Gibson, File)

1970s and 1980s

Under Presidents Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, a Republican, there were short shutdowns almost every year. The longest was in 1978, for 17 days.

A series of legal opinions issued in 1980 and 1981 made shutdowns more impactful. Then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti determined that failure to pass new spending bills required government functioning to shut down in whole or in part. Earlier “shutdowns” did not always entail an actual stop to government functioning and often were simply funding gaps will little real-world effect.

Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

By LUENA RODRIGUEZ-FEO VILEIRA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Here he is, depicted at six months in office, chiseled and brawny, as mighty as the very nation. Here he is as a Star Wars Jedi wielding a patriot-red lightsaber, rescuing our galaxy from the forces of evil. Here he is taking over Gaza, transforming the strip into a luxury resort complete with a golden effigy of himself.

You can be anything, perhaps you were told growing up. Doctor. Astronaut. Maybe, one day, the president. But even the chief executive of the United States, the free world’s leader, frames himself as something more epic — as someone not entirely himself.

On the social media accounts of Donald Trump and his second-term administration, a new official image of the president is emerging bit by bit: one generated artificially.

FILE – FOX News reporter Peter Doocy, right, shows President Donald Trump a photo on his phone during an event about the relocation of U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama in the Oval Office of the White House, Sept. 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

A sign of the times, certainly — when the appeal of reimagining yourself with artificial intelligence has trickled up from us everyday citizens. Bored with your selfies? Join a viral trend: There’s an image generator or a chatbot that can turn you into a Renaissance-style painting, a Studio Ghibli character or an action figure with box art and accessories.

Artificial imagery isn’t new for Trump, an early target of AI-generated simulacra who later exploited the technology during his 2024 campaign for the presidency. “It works both ways,” the Republican president said of AI-generated content at a news conference earlier this month. “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI.”

The AI images of Trump posted by him and his team opt for the alternative — not deceptive but self-evident in their fictitiousness. Pope Francis dies, and Trump jokes to reporters that he’d like to be pope. A week later, he is, but in an AI-generated image that he posts, reposted by the White House. Trump likens himself to a king in a Truth Social post in February, and AI makes him one in an X post by the White House less than an hour later.

The artifice arrives in Trump’s usual style — brassy, unabashed, attention-grabbing — and squares with his social media team’s heavy meme posting, which it has promised to continue. The administration’s official social media accounts have grown by more than 16 million new followers across platforms since Inauguration Day, a White House official told NBC News.

The White House recognizes the appeal. In July, it posted to its X account: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.” Attached to the post, a photo of a sign on the White House lawn parodying the naysayers: “oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHis?”

Behind the commander in chief’s desire to craft an AI self — not itself uncommon — an infantry of official communications channels stands at his ready. And we, the people, can’t help but tune in.

Feelings don’t care about your facts

Like so much on the internet these days, Trump’s AI portraits are primed for people to react, says Evan Cornog, a political historian and author of “The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush.”

Related Articles

With scant information, federal workers brace for possible shutdown

Trump’s comments on autism evoke anger and hope among autistic people and their families

Trump to meet Monday with top four congressional leaders as government shutdown risk looms

A broad wave of firings followed Charlie Kirk’s assassination

Trump’s trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

“By the time you’ve seen it, you’ve understood it. And that’s, of course, the efficacy,” Cornog said. “It requires no effort, either for the person generating it, but particularly for the person consuming it.”

The expressive power of political imagery, regardless of the truth of its message, has long been understood by politicians and their detractors.

President William Henry Harrison’s log cabin and hard cider campaign symbols, representing him as a “man of the people,” helped him win the election of 1840. Thirty years later, political cartoonist Thomas Nast would turn public opinion against William Marcy “Boss” Tweed with his scathing portrayals of the politician, whom he depicted satirically overweight from greed. “Let’s stop those damned pictures!” Tweed once said, or so the story goes.

The decades since witnessed the birth of photo, film, TV, the internet, computer printers, image-editing software and digital screens that shrank until they could fit in our pockets, making it increasingly easy to create and disseminate — and manipulate — imagery.

By contrast, today’s generative AI technology offers greater realism, functionality and accessibility to content creation than ever before, says AI expert Henry Ajder. Not to mention, of course, a capacity for endless automated possibility.

Past presidents “had to actually have fought in a war to run as a war hero,” Cornog says. Now, they can just generate an image of themselves as one. On a horse — or no, a battlefield. With an American flag waving behind him and an eagle soaring.

The AI images of Trump shared by him and his administration chase a similarly heroic vision of the president. Potency — his and the country’s — is a consistent theme, Cornog added.

Indeed, generative AI allows for an exposure of perhaps uncomfortably intimate inner worlds as people use such technology to illustrate and communicate their “fantasy lives” or cartoonish versions of themselves, says Mitchell Stephens, author of “The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.”

But it can just as easily fulfill an inverse desire: to depict or reinforce a subjective concept of reality.

“Quite a lot of people are sharing AI-generated content, which is clearly fake but is almost seen as a revelatory kind of representation of someone,” Ajder said. This content feeds a mentality that mutters, “We all know they’re really like this.”

“And so, even if people know it’s fake,” Ajder said, “they still see it as kind of reflecting and satisfying a kind of truth — their truth about what the world is like.”

Commenters take up the mantle

The lack of subtlety in Trump’s AI images of himself helps explain their consistent virality.

Commenters can be found lamenting the demise of presidential decorum (“I never thought I’d see the day when the White House is just a joke. This is so embarrassing.”) or relishing those very reactions (“Watching the left explode over this has been a treat.”).

Other responses, even from the president’s base, remain unconvinced (as one X user griped under the White House post of Trump as pope: “I voted for you, but this is weird and creepy. More mass deportations and less of whatever this is.”).

But that is tradition for Trump, who finds no trouble cashing the currency of our attention economy: Whether you cracked a smile or clutched your pearls, he still made you look.

“In his first administration, he used Twitter in a way no president had,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, an organization that facilitates the transition between presidents. “What they do in this administration is taking it further, as you’ve had an increase in what can be done online.” Or, as one Reddit user referred to the president: “Troll in Chief.”

Does Trump really think he should be pope? Does the White House really think him a king? Accuracy isn’t the point, not for a man who frequently arbitrates what counts as truth. Trump’s use of AI sticks to a familiar recipe for bait: crude comedy sprinkled with wishful thinking.

“It’s fine,” Trump said in May, when asked whether the AI-generated post of him as pope diminished the substance of the official White House account.

“Have to have a little fun, don’t you?”

DUBLIN — The battle between the Vikings and the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday afternoon at Croke Park was a part of history, marking the first time the NFL had ever hosted a regular-season game in Ireland.

The game itself was as frenetic as the energy from the 74,512 people in attendance.

After falling behind early, veteran quarterback Carson Wentz helped the Vikings mount a furious comeback in the final frame. It wasn’t enough, though, and the Vikings suffered a 24-21 loss to the Steelers.

The fact that the game featured the Vikings playing against future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers added another layer after they reportedly declined to sign him last spring, ultimately deciding to roll with young quarterback J.J. McCarthy.

Here are some takeaways from the Vikings’ 24-21 loss to the Steelers:

Carson Wentz was up and down

It’s hard to put too much blame on Wentz, who was playing behind an offensive line gutted by injuries. Frankly, completing 30 of 46 pass attempts for 350 yards and a pair of touchdowns is a testament to Wentz’s toughness, especially considering how much he got hit. That said, Wentz also had a pair of interceptions on tipped balls, and he admitted he could have done more to avoid being sacked six times. This is probably how it’s going to go if the Vikings decide to stick with Wentz for the foreseeable future. There are going to be ups and downs.

Aaron Rodgers looked pretty good

There’s no doubt that Rodgers looked motivated playing against the Vikings. Never mind that he turns 42 years old in a couple of months; there were still flashes of brilliance on Sunday. After leading a methodical drive that helped the Steelers take control, Rodgers also showed the ability to score fast by hitting receiver DK Metcalf in stride on a slant that went for an 80-yard touchdown. Though he isn’t the player he was at the peak of his powers, Rodgers still has enough talent in his arm to make up for his age.

Justin Jefferson finally broke out

After a slow start by his standards, star receiver Justin Jefferson broke out with his best game of the season. Clearly a focal point of the offense, he finished with 10 receptions for 126 yards. The outburst is something positive the Vikings can take out of the loss. If they can continue to get Jefferson rolling, they will be in much better shape moving forward. He should have at least 10 targets a game, minimum. There have been times in the past that Jefferson has almost singlehandedly willed the Vikings to a win. He might need to do that again at some point.

Jordan Addison showed up

The loss of receiver Jordan Addison was felt while he served his three-game suspension; the Vikings offense was clearly missing some firepower. In his first game back, Addison caught four passes for 114 yards. The stat line speaks to how explosive Addison can be with the ball in his hands. The only downside from Addison in the game was that he stumbled on what would have an 82-yard touchdown and got caught from behind by linebacker Payton Wilson at the goal line.

The offensive line is an issue

After losing right tackle Brian O’Neill to a knee injury, the Vikings also lost center Ryan Kelly to a concussion on Sunday — two more blows to a position group that has become an issue for the Vikings. That group simply hasn’t been able to stay healthy at any point, and it appears O’Neill and Kelly might be out for a little bit. That doesn’t even take into account that rookie left guard Donovan Jackson recently had wrist surgery and is still going through the recovery process. The only players from the projected starting offensive line that are healthy at the moment are left tackle Christian Darrisaw and right guard Will Fries. That has left the Vikings searching for answers.

Related Articles

Frederick: Vikings may not have an answer at quarterback

After investing in the offensive line, it remains an issue for the Vikings

Vikings can’t complete comeback in 24-21 loss to Steelers in Dublin

Photos: Vikings vs. Steelers in Dublin

The Loop Fantasy Football Update Week 4: Last-minute moves

Today is Monday, Sept. 29, the 272nd day of 2025. There are 93 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Sept. 29, 1954, Willie Mays of the New York Giants made a running, over-the-shoulder catch of a ball hit by Vic Wirtz of the Cleveland Indians in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series; “The Catch” would become one of the most famous plays in baseball history.

Also on this date:

In 1789, Congress officially established a regular army under the U.S. Constitution.

Related Articles

With scant information, federal workers brace for possible shutdown

Gunman opens fire at Michigan church and sets it ablaze, killing at least 4 and wounding 8

States scramble to plug transportation funding holes

Trump’s comments on autism evoke anger and hope among autistic people and their families

Today in History: September 28, Coronavirus pandemic hits grim milestone

In 1938, British, French, German and Italian leaders concluded the Munich Agreement, which was aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an act creating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claimed the first of seven victims in the Chicago area; the case, which led to legislation and packaging improvements to deter product tampering, remains unsolved.

In 1988, the U.S. space shuttle program resumed after a 32-month suspension following the 1986 Challenger disaster with the launch of Discovery, carrying a crew of five astronauts, from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Discovery’s crew deployed a satellite and conducted science experiments before returning to Earth with a landing on Oct. 3 at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

In 1990, the construction of Washington National Cathedral concluded, 83 years to the day after its foundation stone was laid in a ceremony attended by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 2005, John G. Roberts Jr. was sworn in as the nation’s 17th chief justice after winning Senate confirmation.

In 2017, Tom Price resigned as President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services amid investigations into his use of costly charter flights for official travel at taxpayer expense.

In 2018, Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, agreed to pay a total of $40 million to settle a government lawsuit alleging that Musk had duped investors with misleading statements about a proposed buyout of the company.

In 2021, a judge in Los Angeles suspended Britney Spears’ father from the conservatorship that had controlled her life and money for 13 years, saying the arrangement reflected a “toxic environment.”

In 2022, rescue crews piloted boats and waded through flooded streets to save thousands of Floridians trapped after Hurricane Ian destroyed homes and businesses and left millions in the dark.

Today’s Birthdays:

Former NASA administrator and ex-Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, is 83.
Actor Ian McShane is 83.
Jazz musician Jean-Luc Ponty is 83.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, is 82.
Retired TV journalist and sportscaster Bryant Gumbel is 77.
Olympic gold medal runner Sebastian Coe is 69.
Rock musician Les Claypool is 62.
Actor Zachary Levi is 45.
Actor Chrissy Metz (TV: “This Is Us”) is 45.
Actor Kelly McCreary (TV: “Grey’s Anatomy”) is 44.
Football Hall of Famer Calvin Johnson is 40.
NBA All-Star Kevin Durant is 37.
Pop singer Halsey is 31.