As Musk forces a
shutdown, the Trump presidency is already collapsing into chaos
Lies, conspiracy
theories and middle-of-the-night rants are no way to run a country.
December
20, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. ESTToday at 7:30 a.m. EST
They’re baaaack.
Just six weeks ago, voters elected Donald Trump by the
slimmest of margins in hopes that he would lower the cost of living. But Trump
quickly walked back that promise, saying “it’s very hard” to reduce
prices.
Instead, he has already returned the country to the
unrelenting chaos, and the government to the ludicrous dysfunction, that
dominated his first term. And he hasn’t even taken office yet. This week alone,
Trump:
·
Announced, in a 3:23 a.m. social media post,
his interest in annexing Canada.
·
Spread unfounded paranoia about UFOs
invading the East Coast. (“The government knows what is happening. … Something
strange is going on.”)
·
Signaled, in another middle-of-the-night post,
his desire to have the FBI probe prominent Trump critic Liz Cheney for
violating “numerous federal laws” in the congressional investigation of the
Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
·
Declared that he was suing the Des Moines Register —
because the Iowa newspaper’s election poll was wrong.
·
Suggested, via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
that he would limit access to
abortion medication.
And then, the pièce de résistance: Trump, and the man he
tapped to police government spending, Elon Musk, killed a painstakingly
negotiated, bipartisan spending package at the 11th hour, sending the federal
government hurtling toward a Christmas shutdown — which would be the first time
the government is forced to turn out the lights since, well, the last time
Trump was in charge.
Musk, with an extended tantrum on his social media site X,
successfully sabotaged the spending bill, which would have provided aid to
farmers and disaster relief for storm-ravaged North Carolina, Florida and other
parts of the country. “‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually
shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible
bill,” proclaimed the richest man in the
world, who also posted “YES” in response to the sentiment “Just
close down the govt. until January 20th. Defund everything.” The man who spent
hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect Trump also threatened to defeat
those Republicans who didn’t do as he commanded.
Trump, who had voiced no previous objection to the
legislation, sided with Musk. Congressional Republicans folded and then, over
the next 24 hours, rewrote the bill to be satisfy Trump and Musk, their
multi-billionaire masters. They kept most of the spending in the bill but, at
Trump’s insistence, added a provision to raise the debt ceiling by about
$5 trillion — enough for Trump to push through another massive tax cut for
corporations and the wealthiest Americans. They removed funds for nutritional
assistance and community hospitals. They excised a provision that would have
kept down drug prices. Incredibly, they even struck a provision that would have
limited American businesses’ investments in China.
Musk and those like him stood to save untold billions in
taxes — while securing green lights to move jobs to China. That’s a sizable
return on the $277 million Musk spent on Trump’s campaign. MAGA!
Let us at least give Trump credit for transparency. For
decades, corporations and billionaires shaped Republican policies from the back
rooms of the Capitol. Now, they control the Republican Party right out in the
open, for all to see. This kind of naked power grab is straight out of the
Gilded Age.
If the government shuts down after midnight Friday, 1.3
million active-duty troops will go without pay, as will hundreds of thousands
of civilian workers. National parks will close, air traffic and airports will
be snarled over the holidays, food-safety inspection will be curtailed, tax
refunds and operations at Social Security offices will be delayed, and millions
of poor and working-class people will lose access to other government services.
The shutdown will add billions of dollars to the debt. But Musk (net worth:
$440 billion) will be just fine — and he is now the one directing the
Republican agenda in Congress.
As the world’s wealthiest man killed the spending bill,
Republicans marveled at their own dysfunction.
“It’s a total dumpster fire,” Rep. Eric Burlison
(Missouri) told reporters.
“It’s a fascinating mess,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski
(Alaska) told CNN’s Manu Raju.
“This is ridiculous,” Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri) told Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “This is how you
want your government to run? I mean, these guys can’t manage their way out of a
paper bag.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida) was so baffled by the
happenings that she walked over to the speaker’s office to investigate. “I’m
actually over here because no one’s returning my phone calls,” she told reporters. “I was trying to figure out
what’s going on.”
She left without an answer — because House GOP leaders had
no plan.
Even before the Musk-led meltdown, Rep. Victoria Spartz
(Indiana) declared she would no longer “participate
in the caucus until I see that Republican leadership in Congress is governing.
I do not need to be involved in circuses.”
But this is just the first act of what promises to be a
four-year circus. Already, a dozen or so House Republicans, angered by Speaker
Mike Johnson’s inept handling of the spending bill, are now making noises about
blocking his reelection as speaker Jan. 3 — and the defection of even two or
three Republicans could doom him. This, in turn, could delay Congress’s
certification of Trump’s election victory and possibly create a constitutional
crisis over the transfer of power. Even if Johnson (R-Louisiana) gets out of
that mess, a few House Republicans are already lining up in opposition to
extending Trump’s tax cuts, a core component of his 2025 agenda.
For those too young to remember the last go-round, this is
what governing looks like under Trump. Musk’s destruction of the spending bill
was particularly ugly, for it showed that, with Trump in charge, an unelected
megabillionaire can bring the U.S. government to a halt by employing MAGA’s
trademark mixture of vitriol, threat and disinformation.
The short-term, three-month spending bill had been
negotiated at Republicans’ request so that Trump would have
the chance to reset spending for the rest of fiscal year 2025, given that
Republicans will have unified control of the federal government early in the
new year. Johnson didn’t have enough GOP votes to pass the bill (or any spending
bill), so he had to negotiate a bipartisan package with Democrats — and, as of
early this week, the bill was on its way to passage.
Enter “President Musk” (as Democrats have taken to calling
him), who in his social media campaign of destruction on Wednesday called the
legislation not just “criminal” but “an insane crime.” He flooded the
Twitterverse with disinformation, including claims that the bill included a 40 percent pay increase for Congress (in
actuality, a cost-of-living adjustment of no more than 3.8 percent); a $3 billion giveaway for
an NFL stadium in D.C. (it included no money for the stadium); an “outrageous” provision blocking a probe of
the Jan. 6 investigative
committee; and another provision “funding bioweapon labs”
(both false).
The threat and the lies had the intended effect. By
nightfall on Wednesday, the bill was dead.
“THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL
PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote.
So true! But instead, Americans elected Trump — and now
we’re doomed to four years of this mayhem.
As Republicans circled the drain toward a shutdown, former
speaker Newt Gingrich, the GOP architect of the 1990s shutdowns that started
the modern era of dysfunction, celebrated the collapse. “President Trump and
Republicans should not be afraid of a government shutdown. The next election is
two years away,” he wrote.
“I’m all in,” responded Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). And,
echoing Musk, she added: “The government can shut down all the way until [Jan.
20] as far as I’m concerned.”
But why stop on Jan. 20? Republicans can now cause years of
chaos, which is exactly what some of them intend to do. “The Speaker of the
House need not be a member of Congress,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) correctly
pointed out on Thursday. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing
Elon Musk.”
Greene quickly joined the effort, launching an online poll
that asked: “Would you support [Elon Musk] for Speaker of the House?”
It’s a reasonable point. This plutocrat already controls
congressional Republicans. They might as well make his authority official.
“Do you want to be speaker of the House?" Trump jokingly asked Musk while
being interviewed on Thursday by ABC News’s Rachel Scott.
Musk, who was in the room, replied with a laugh: “Should I
be?”
The plutocrats’ control of the GOP is no joke, though.
Johnson, as his spending bill was collapsing on Wednesday, essentially admitted on
Fox News that he answers not to the people, nor even to the people’s
representatives, but rather to Musk and fellow rich guy Vivek Ramaswamy,
private citizens both. The speaker said he was on “a text chain” and phone
calls with the two heads of Trump’s nongovernmental “Department of Government
Efficiency,” begging for their support. “Remember, guys, we still have just a
razor-thin margin of Republicans, so any bill has to have Democratic votes,”
Johnson said he told the pair.
Clearly, they were unimpressed by the speaker’s pleas — and
so Musk showed Johnson who was in charge. This is what Trump has already built
with the trust placed in him by the “forgotten man and woman”: A government of
the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.
Among Republicans, a few principled fiscal hawks defied
Trump and Musk. In Thursday evening’s floor debate, Rep. Chip Roy (Texas),
excoriated his GOP colleagues for abandoning their fiscal responsibility and
for surrendering on the debt ceiling, which had been one of the key tools
conservatives have used in the past to force spending cuts. He called their
actions “embarrassing,” “shameful” and “asinine.” Speaking on the Democrats’
time during the debate, Roy said: “I’m absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns
on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American
people and say you think this is fiscally responsible. It’s absolutely
ridiculous.”
Trump spent the afternoon threatening the congressman from
Texas for sticking to his principles. “Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy,
with no talent,” he posted, calling for challengers “to go after Chip in the Primary.”
The brazen manipulation of Republicans by Musk and Trump
fired up a Democratic minority that had been licking its wounds since last
month’s election. Democrats chanted “Hell no!” in a caucus meeting before the debate, then
went to the floor with a revived populist zeal, decrying an “illegitimate
oligarchy” and Republicans bowing to an “unelected contractor reaping billions
in government contracts” and working to “subsidize the lifestyles of the rich
and shameless.”
“What is before us today is just part of an effort to shut
down the government,” said Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York),
“unless we, as representatives of the American people, bend to the will of just
a handful of millionaires and billionaires” for whom “clearly some in this
Congress are working.”
In the vote, only two Democrats sided with Musk and Trump:
Kathy Castor (Florida) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington). And though 172
Republicans buckled under Trump’s pressure, 38 Republicans stuck to their
principles — more than enough to send the GOP’s new plan to a lopsided defeat.
With less than 24 hours to go until a shutdown, the House
Republican majority, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Elon Musk, couldn’t come
up with the votes to keep the government opened. “There is no plan,” Rep. Ralph
Norman (R-South Carolina) told the Hill’s Emily Brooks after
the vote. “Trump wants the thing to shut down.”
Shutting down the government because of the rants and
threats of an erratic billionaire is no way to run a country. But this is where
we are. Welcome (back) to the Trump administration.
