Tom Emmer Is the GOP’s Smear Machine

The number-three House Republican combines a mean streak with disregard for the truth.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) on October 29, 2025, with House Speaker Mike Johnson in the background. (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS claim to be innocent in the government shutdown. Unlike Donald Trump—who has used layoffs, termination of construction projects, and additional threats to bully Democrats during the impasse—House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune say they just want to work constructively across the aisle, not score political points. Johnson and Thune insist that they’re helpless in the standoff because they need sixty votes in the Senate to break a Democratic filibuster.

But the third-ranking House Republican, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, has abandoned this pretense. Like Trump, Emmer is vilifying Democrats, hurling gratuitous insults, and urging Republican senators to exempt appropriations bills from the filibuster.

Johnson often accuses Democrats of kowtowing to American Marxists. But Emmer goes further. In the past month, by my count, he has called Democrats, their political base, or No Kings protesters “Communist” (seven times), “Marxist” (fourteen times), “violent” (nine times), “almost jihadist” (once), and “terrorist” or “pro-terrorist” (twenty-four times).

In a radio interview on October 9, Emmer accused Democrats of having changed completely from the days when they merely disagreed with Republicans “over the size and scope of government.” Nowadays, he professed, “They want Venezuela. They want Cuba. These are not constitutional republic–loving Democrats. These are Marxists, Communists.”

Emmer doesn’t confine these hyperbolic terms to the left. He applies them indiscriminately. On Wednesday, he even went after Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, who had worked for eight years at the CIA. “Abigail Spanberger, she’s on the Marxist side of the party,” Emmer declared preposterously. As evidence, he claimed that she “doesn’t have a problem” when “young girls have to be in dressing rooms with young men.” That was an egregious misrepresentation of Spanberger’s position. It was also comically unrelated to Marxism.

Emmer routinely impugns the patriotism of Democrats and their supporters. “They truly do hate, they hate America, these people that they’re playing to,” he charged in a radio interview on October 13. He said the No Kings protests on October 18 would prove his point. “You’ll see them on Saturday on the mall. They just do not love this country,” he told Maria Bartiromo a few days before the protests. In the radio interview, he predicted: “You’re going to see all kinds of pro-terrorist stuff, you know, the Hamas flags . . . on the mall on Saturday.”

He was wrong. It’s possible that among the 7 million participants, someone carried a Hamas flag. But I can’t find any reports or pictures of that flag, which is quite distinct from the Palestinian flag. Nevertheless, on October 24, Emmer pretended to have been vindicated. “All you have to do is watch” the protests, he asserted, offering no evidence. “They’re carrying around their Hamas flags.”

Sometimes Emmer says the Democratic party has a pro-terrorist “wing.” At other times, he says this putative pro-terrorist faction is the party’s base. “You got a bunch of Marxists and Communists holding this so-called No Kings protest,” he told Scott Jennings in an interview on October 20. “They support Hamas terrorists. And this is the Democrat base.”

One measure of Emmer’s insincerity, when he feigns concern that Hamas sympathizers are taking over the Democratic party and endangering America, is his willingness to joke that his Democratic colleagues are worse than Hamas. On October 13, radio host Dan O’Donnell asked Emmer whether it was “easier to negotiate with Hamas terrorists than it is with congressional Democrats.” Emmer, seizing on the invitation to ding his opponents, replied “Yes.”

Like Trump, Emmer is often gratuitously nasty. He loves grade-school taunts. He derides Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, as “Chucky.” He calls Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, “Mamdani the Commie.” He calls the governor of Minnesota—“my goofy moronic governor named Timmy Walz”—“a joke.” He says Minneapolis and St. Paul are run by “boy-toy mayors.”

During the shutdown, Emmer has expressed particular contempt for Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House. “Poor Hakeem is nothing more than a cartoon character,” Emmer scoffed during a Fox Business interview on October 6. Two days later, he sneered, “What’s laughable is Hakeem Jeffries being called a leader.” In a radio interview on October 22, Emmer brought up Jeffries only to dismiss him: “Well, not Hakeem. He’s worthless.”

If there’s anything about you that a demagogue could use to turn people against you—if you’re old, for example, or if you’re fat, or if you came from another country—Emmer will find it. On October 8, he told Fox News anchor John Roberts that Schumer was “past his years . . . like an aging athlete.” When Roberts joked that it might be time for Schumer to retire “to the broadcast booth,” Emmer decided to add another insult. “I’d keep him away from that, too,” said Emmer. “He doesn’t have much of a presence.”

The next day, Emmer went after Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has a well-known problem controlling his weight. “He’s got no business being in charge of even a buffet,” Emmer cracked.

One danger of this kind of demagoguery—targeting people based on their visible characteristics—is that it can cross the line into bigotry. Two minutes after his cheap shot at Pritzker, Emmer turned his fire on Rep. Ilhan Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who originally came from Somalia. “You will hear people in Minnesota ask, ‘Does she represent Minnesota in the United States of America, or does she represent Somalia?’” said Emmer. He made it clear that he shared this suspicion: “We always question that.”

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EMMER DOESN’T JUST MIRROR Trump’s mean streak. He also parrots Trump’s conspiracy theories. In his interview with Bartiromo on October 14, he said Joe Biden had managed to become president only after “an amazing number of voters mysteriously showed up in the ’20 election.” And in a Breitbart News podcast a week earlier, Emmer falsely alleged that former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken “stole” that state’s 2008 Senate election.

But having a Trump protégé in House leadership carries risks. Thune and Johnson have insisted, based on the Senate’s sixty-vote threshold, that only Democrats could end the shutdown. Trump’s call to nuke the filibuster complicates this argument. But within the GOP’s congressional leadership, Thune and Johnson have tried to maintain a united stand against crossing that line.

Emmer has broken that unity. “I think that cloture rule should go away when it comes to funding bills, appropriations bills,” he told radio host Amy Demboski on October 22. “I think you got to blow up that cloture rule, which requires sixty votes. . . . at least for the appropriations process, so we can get this thing moving and fund the government.”

For once, Emmer was telling the truth: Republicans could end the shutdown tomorrow. All they have to do is abolish the filibuster for appropriations. What’s holding them back is reluctance to plunge America deeper into scorched-earth politics. Trump has no such reluctance. Nor does Emmer.