Vice President JD Vance took center stage Wednesday at the White House press briefing on the first day of the federal government shutdown, during which he insisted that Democrats were responsible for the impasse on Capitol Hill.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Vance as her special guest minutes before the briefing started, signaling Vance’s lead role in President Donald Trump’s response to the battle with Democrats. Vance spent Wednesday morning doing a heavy slate of television hits, attempting to shoulder Democrats with the blame for the shutdown.

Recommended Stories

• WATCH LIVE: JD Vance joins White House press briefing
• Jeffries’s criticism of Trump’s AI video sparks another video
• Trump highlights healthcare plan amid Democrats’ shutdown narrative

LIVE UPDATES: GOVERNMENT ENTERS SHUTDOWN WITH NO DEAL IN SIGHT

“The reason your government is shut down at this very minute is because, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and even a few moderate Democrats supported opening the government, the Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic Party shut down the government,” Vance said. “Because they said to us, we will open the government, but only if you give billions of dollars of funding for healthcare for illegal aliens.”

Republicans have repeatedly blamed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) fear of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for the tensions over how to fund the federal government moving forward.

Vance told reporters that he has spoken with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, adding that Trump has also participated in those conversations.

He said the Democrats he’s spoken with fall into two categories: “those who are negotiating in good faith” and those “who say, ‘Give us everything we want or we’re going to keep the government shut down.”

“We just write those people off because they’re not negotiating in good faith,” Vance continued. “We’ve already got three more Democrats last night than I thought we would get, and I think it’s because they recognize the illogic of the position of taking the entire American economy hostage because they don’t get their policy priorities.”

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is seeking to start “reduction in force” notices to permanently fire thousands of federal workers who will be furloughed during the shutdown.

Vance and Leavitt both conceded that layoffs are likely “imminent” the longer the shutdown continues. However, they were less forthcoming on specifics, such as which workers will lose their jobs.

“We haven’t made any final decisions about what we’re going to do with certain workers. What we’re saying is that we might have to take extraordinary steps,” Vance told reporters when asked why federal workers will be fired rather than furloughed, as they were in past shutdowns.

“The longer this goes on, we’re going to have to take extraordinary measures to ensure the people’s government operates, again, not perfectly — because it’s not going to operate perfectly in the midst of a shutdown — but operates as well as it possibly can,” Vance said.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 750,000 federal workers would be furloughed under the shutdown. That is down from 850,000 out of 2.1 million nonpostal federal employees who were furloughed in previous shutdowns and reflects the layoffs and early retirement programs Trump initiated this year to slim the size of the federal workforce.

“There are unfortunate consequences to a government shutdown, and the federal government is not receiving any cash at the moment, and so the Office of Management and Budget has been tasked with looking over the receipts and looking over the budget of the entire federal bureaucracy, and, as the Vice President said, determining what needs to continue to go out the door, and what can we continue to keep running, and what unfortunately is going to have to come to an end,” Leavitt added in response to a separate question. “So those decisions are being made, and, unfortunately, layoffs are very likely.”

Vance also defended Trump’s repeated use of a sombrero meme over the image of Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

“I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now, I make this solid promise that if you help us reopen the government, the sombrero memes will stop,” Vance joked.

However, Democrats have said the memes are racist, which Vance downplayed.

“On the sombrero thing, Hakeem Jeffries said it was racist. And I know that he said that, and I honestly don’t even know what that means,” Vance continued. “Like, is he a Mexican American that is offended by having a sombrero meme?”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance’s Republican predecessor, took a similar front-seat role during the last partial government shutdown. Trump directed Pence to lead talks with Schumer, but the pair failed to reach an accord for several weeks, dragging the shutdown from December 2018 through January 2019 for a record 35 days of closure.

At the time, some on Capitol Hill viewed Pence as having little hope of brokering an accord and believed Trump would have to engage in negotiations with Schumer and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to reopen the government.

SHUTDOWN: JOHNSON MAKES NO PROMISES ON OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES

You can watch Vance’s comments in full below.