Pundits ... also attacked Trump-supporting service members.

During a surprise visit to the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq on Wednesday, Trump gave a speech to cheering troops, signed some soldiers' red Make America Great Again hats, and posed for photos and videos - including with a group in full special forces gear. He tweeted out the video after Air Force One departed Al Asad, to a destination yet unspecified.

From Iraq, Air Force One traveled to the Ramstein Air Base, the primary US military hub in Germany. While the plane refueled, Trump visited with the troops there. Reporters in the US first griped about the inhumanity of dragging troops out of bed in the middle of the night, before they saw photos and video from Ramstein of some service members waving Trump flags and MAGA hats.

Malcolm Nance, who complained about Trump supposedly doxxing the SEALs in Iraq, now demanded a House investigation into the troops in Germany.

Other journalists and commenters joined in the calls to name and shame the service members, and even prosecute them under military laws, for sporting Trump campaign merchandise.

US Air Forces Europe headquarters said on Thursday that it saw no problem with the troops' behavior during the presidential visit.

"There is no rule against Airmen bringing personal items to be signed by the president," USAFE said in a statement quoted by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes. "No policy violations have been brought to our attention at this time."

Then there were pundits and celebrities who took credit for "shaming" Trump into making the trip, even though the president was already flying over Europe when they tweeted NBC News' tepid take, and presidential trips are not embarked-on at a moment's notice.

Though Trump seems to be getting this kind of media treatment no matter what he does, Thursday's pearl-clutching seems to be an extension of last week's hysterics after he ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

The partial government shutdown that began last week appears all but certain to continue into the new year.

Officially, both the House and the Senate each are scheduled to reconvene Monday, New Year's Eve. But those are expected to be little more than pro forma sessions based on the sharply articulated positions both sides have taken on funding of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The House and Senate returned to work Thursday for the first time since Saturday but quickly adjourned after scheduling no votes, signaling once again that little, if any, progress has been made toward resolving the budget impasse that has shut down a quarter of the federal government.

White House Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders admonished Democrats for leaving town, though most Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, were not in Washington either.

"The President and his team stayed in Washington over Christmas hoping to negotiate a deal that would stop the dangerous crisis on the border, protect American communities, and re-open the government. The Democrats decided to go home," she said in a statement. "The only rational conclusion is that the Democrat party is openly choosing to keep our government closed to protect illegal immigrants rather than the American people."

Sanders said the president "does not want the government to remain shut down, but he will not sign a proposal that does not first prioritize our county's safety and security."

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American Engagement Technologies (AET), which Hoffman gave $750,000 to put $100,000 of the entrepreneur's money towards New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm which fabricated some 1,000 Russian language Twitter accounts to follow Moore.

The company used the tactic to link the controversial Republican to so-called Russian influence campaigns and then fed it to the mainstream media. They also created misleading Facebook pages urging Republicans to support a 'write-in' candidate instead of supporting Moore. The ploy was revealed by New York Times earlier this month.

"I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing," Hoffman told the Washington Post. "For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET - the organization I did support - more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject."

AET is ran by former Barack Obama administration official, Mikey Dickerson, who previously helped the US government with its adoption of new technology.

Last week, Facebook suspended five accounts linked to the operation for "engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior."One of the accounts belonged to the CEO of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, who claims he was acting alone as a researcher and not on behalf of the company.

Morgan is also one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 dashboard, a tool that purports to look into ongoing Russian social media operations by monitoring Twitter accounts, the list of which is too secret to be disclosed.

Hamilton 68 has been used by US publication Mother Jones to bolster a December 2017 article titled: 'Russian Propagandists Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win.'

Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat who narrowly defeated Moore last May, has called for a federal investigation. A move supported by the chastened Hoffman. "What is obvious now is that we have focused so much on Russia that we haven't focused on the fact that people in this country could take the same playbook and do the same damn thing," stated Jones.