By Andrew Feinberg

Copyright independent

Most of the federal government may be shut down — with rank and file employees forced to stay home on furlough or work without pay under threat of layoffs — but that isn’t stopping President Donald Trump from enjoying a couple’s night out.

The president, joined by First Lady Melania Trump, left the White House on Thursday for the first time since government funding lapsed two days earlier for a six-minute motorcade along closed-off streets to a neighbor’s house — Vice President JD Vance’s official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

There, the Trumps dined with the vice president and second lady Usha Vance for roughly an hour and a half before heading back to the White House.

The high-powered foursome’s double date night came just over day after Vice President Vance made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room on Wednesday, the first day of what has now become a three-day partial government shutdown with no end in sight.

At the time, Vance falsely accused Democrats of instigating the shutdown out of a desire to force the Trump administration to give “billions of dollars to health care funding for illegal aliens” — something that has been illegal since the enactment of a 1986 law signed by then-president Ronald Reagan.

He also promised “imminent” layoffs of federal workers on account of the shutdown, something that has no precedent in previous government funding fights and which may be illegal because carrying out the layoffs would incur new debts on the part of the government.

Vance also defended President Trump’s use of a racist AI-generated video to mock House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries by depicting the New York Democrat, who is Black, with an oversized sombrero and a cartoonish mustache.

The vice president said the video was “funny” and said Trump was “joking and having a good time.”

“I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now I make this solemn promise to you that if you help us reopen the government, the Sombrero memes will stop. And I’ve talked to the President of the United States about that,” he said.

For his part, Trump has continued to threaten to fire thousands of federal workers from what he called “Democrat Agencies” in a social media post on Thursday, with the aid of Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought.

Vought, an architect of the right-wing Project 2025 plan for consolidating federal power in the White House and using that power to weaken the Democratic Party, has used his authority over federal spending during the shutdown to punish voters who elected Democrats to the Senate and did not vote for Trump last year by suspending or cancelling funding for infrastructure and clean energy projects in their states.