America is hours away from a holiday season government shutdown courtesy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Everyone knew the president-elect and his new super-disrupter buddy were going to cause havoc in Washington. But no one thought they’d manage it even before the 47th president is sworn in.
Barring a pre-Christmas legislative miracle, the US government will plunge into a partial shutdown at midnight Friday after Musk tanked a year-end spending deal and the Trump doubled down with a demand for new debt spending authority that he never had a chance of getting through Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s desperate Plan B on Thursday only succeeded in coming up with a bill that sparked a revolt on the House floor against Trump by 38 Republicans and almost all Democrats.
Two days of chaos on Capitol Hill upended what had appeared to be a calm end to a bitterly ill-tempered 118th United States Congress.
It was a Wednesday social media storm by Musk, who will co-chair an ad-hoc Department of Government Efficiency next year, and the return of Trump’s congressional wrecking ball that turned everything on its head.
Johnson had worked for weeks to try to keep the government open. That is now a strategy that threatens his already wobbling speakership since plenty of MAGA Republicans would be happy to see it close, even though that could inconvenience and economically harm many of their working-class voters.
By Thursday evening, his authority was in tatters as furious Republicans turned on one another on the House floor. Democrats suddenly emerged from their post-election funk to warn that the real new power in the land was not Trump but the world’s richest man: “President Musk.”