Last week, from the presidential mind that brought you telling kids Santa isn’t real on Christmas Eve and tweeting “I am all alone (poor me)” the same day an eight-year-old migrant boy died in U.S. custody, Donald Trump decided the best thing he could do for the country was shut down the federal government over his useless border wall. The news roiled an already freaked-out market, and investors weren’t the only ones unhappy about the turn of events. Trump, too, was clearly cranky about the fact that the shutdown was eating into his previously planned 16-day vacation at Mar-a-Lago, rage tweeting about everything from the wall to the Federal Reserve to Jim Mattis in between exposing the location and identities of Navy SEAL Team 5 and demanding Democrats end the shutdown he once said—just about two weeks ago—that he wouldn’t blame them for. On Thursday, though, he seemed to have found a silver lining to keeping the federal government partially closed:

Don’t adjust your TVs folks, that is the president of the United States seemingly suggesting that the issue of federal workers not getting paid during the shutdown he engineered doesn’t matter because they’re playing for the other team. (Incidentally, two days prior, Trump insisted that “many” federal employees “want the wall” and have said to him or otherwise communicated that he should hold out until he gets the funding.)

“This is outrageous,” Senator Mark Warner tweeted in response to the president’s latest baseless claim. “Federal employees don’t go to work wearing red or blue jerseys. They’re public servants. And the President is treating them like poker chips at one of his failed casinos.” Senator Amy Klobuchar wrote: “These shutdown workers work for the FBI & TSA (not GOP or DNC). They signed up to protect us & work for America regardless of party.”

As the shutdown hit its fifth day on Wednesday, federal workers have been sharing worries about not receiving a paycheck on Twitter using the hashtag #ShutdownStories. Julie Burr, an administrative assistant at the Department of Transportation, wrote that she is “a single mom in panic mode” and is “picking up extra shifts at [her] 2nd job but it won't pay the rent.” Incredibly, the government has reportedly created sample letters for employees to send to creditors explaining their situation. “I am a federal employee who has recently been furloughed due to a lack of funding of my agency,” one meant to be sent to landlords reads. “Because of this, my income has been severely cut, and I am unable to pay the entire cost of my rent, along with my other expenses.”

Of course, if you ask congressmen like outgoing representative Mark Sanford, these people are whining about nothing. “It’s not as if these folks don’t get paid—it’s just that there’s a lag and a delay in doing so,” Sanford told The New York Times. That’s a perspective probably shared by President F-ck ’Em If They’re Dems, who presumably doesn’t realize that not everyone can be routinely bailed out by their rich father. “People can’t pay their rent, they can’t put food on the table,” Joyce Vance, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the 2013 shutdown, told the Times. “They’re not sitting on a huge pile of cash for an emergency.”