President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would be meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” to discuss potentially permanent cuts to government agencies created and funded by Congress.

Democrats have pointed out that mass firings of government employees during the present government shutdown would be plainly illegal.

Trump justified himself by falsely characterizing broad swaths of the administrative state as partisan.

He said he and Vought will meet “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” the president wrote on his Truth Social page.

He went on: “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

There are no public events on the president’s calendar, so it is unclear when the meeting will take place.

Trump posted multiple times on his Truth Social account blaming Democrats for causing the government shutdown in order to, in his words, “GIVE YOUR HEALTHCARE MONEY TO ILLEGAL ALIENS AND OPEN OUR BORDERS TO THE CRIMINALS OF THE WORLD.”

The claim is wildly misleading, at best. But it is one that the president and his top administration officials have been repeating multiple times per day as they try to win the messaging battle over the shutdown.

“Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud. Billions of Dollars can be saved,” Trump wrote in another post.

His post about Vought was particularly notable given how, during his campaign, Trump studiously claimed to know nothing about Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for taking full advantage of a second Trump presidency to enact extremist policies and make drastic cuts to the federal government.

Vought was the project’s key architect.