Will there be a government shutdown? Trump wants the clout – and the chaos. | Opinion
Trump asked Republicans not to support a bipartisan deal that would avoid a government shutdown. Then he blamed Biden.
Did you forget what Donald Trump's first term as president was like? This week we get a reminder – governing is for losers. Burning things down so you can be illuminated by the flames is all the rage. Again.
America's government may be funded when Friday night becomes Saturday morning. Or we all might lurch into another Trump government shutdown. The scramble is on to vote on that in the U.S. House, likely Thursday night. Trump on Thursday afternoon backed a new funding proposal he forced at the last minute.
A government shutdown would arrive just in time for Christmas. Again.
Republicans officially just want chaos and attention
Why? U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and devoted Trump toady, had the temerity to negotiate a proposed deal between his party and the Democratic caucus to fund the government through mid-March in a complicated package that included disaster relief, help for farmers and a bunch of other stuff.
American voters chose a closely divided Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, with a narrow Republican majority in the House. That means Johnson often needs the votes of Democratic caucus members to get anything done.
Why? Because the far-right wing of the Republican caucus has two kinds of members – those who dogmatically declare that any kind of governance that doesn't exactly match their ideology is corrupt and those who know that tossing tantrums in public and on social media draws attention that can then be monetized via fundraising.
Both kind are paid $174,000 a year to govern and could not care less if you watch them refuse to do their actual jobs while cashing those checks. They tend to hail from deep-red districts where voters have been bamboozled to believe that paying for nothing is some kind of bargain.
Elon Musk is somehow a Republican influencer
Still, those bad actors are amateurs when measured against our president-elect and his unelected chancellor, Elon Musk, who got the fire burning for a government shutdown Wednesday with a series of obviously false and misleading posts on his social media cesspool X.
Here's an example: Musk amplified a false claim that the continuing resolution to fund the government included $3 billion for a new NFL stadium in Washington, D.C. It does no such thing. The budget deal just shifted control of the site of RFK Stadium there from the federal government to the local government.
Musk would rather traffic in disinformation than converse with accurate information, all while threatening to subsidize 2026 Republican primary challengers for any House member who supported the pending budget deal.
Musk, who just wrapped up a $250 million acquisition of Trump's presidency with often-misleading dark-money campaign ads, has the deep pockets and amoral ambition to follow through on those threats. Trump followed Musk's lead, declaring at the 11th hour that the deal should be stripped of its spending while also extending or eliminating the country's debt ceiling for borrowing money to pay creditors.
Trump knows the cracks he creates in government will be blamed on Biden
Trump wants that now so it can be blamed for all time on President Joe Biden and not something he has to actually work on when he becomes president again.
Trump, of course, will not accept responsibility if the government shuts down. Stop here for a moment to think – can you recall a single time Trump took responsibility for anything that reflected badly on him? That sort of introspection is absent from his DNA.
On cue, Trump told ABC News on Thursday that any government shutdown would be Biden's fault because he's still president until Jan. 20.
That's absurd. But Trump knows his zealous supporters will swallow any claim, even as he and Musk snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They own this.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, should go buy a lottery ticket. That's how lucky he is that Republicans, who will control the White House and both chambers of Congress next month, formed an early, circular firing squad.
How can Democrats trust anything Republicans say now?
The Democrats had a deal with Republicans in the House, from Johnson on down. They can now withhold support for Johnson's plan B – if he finds one – thanks to the Republicans trashing the deal. Democrats can credibly note that no deal from Johnson can be trusted now because everything is subject to Trump's whim.
If this is again our new normal – a return to Trump's social media swiveling chaos, where no position is fixed and nothing is ever his fault – the Democrats can spend the next two years asking voters if this is what they really want.
Trump already held the record for the longest – and most pointless – government shutdown, which lasted for 35 days as 2018 turned to 2019 during his first chaotic term as president. That shutdown, which started three days before Christmas, was driven by a Trump tantrum after Congress refused to allocate more than $5 billion for his beloved border wall project.
Trump delivered a speech at the and of that shutdown that ran for more than 2,000 words. And not a single one of them acknowledged his culpability in it all. Every bad event is always someone else's fault. Always.
This is not the first major proposal Trump has trashed from outside the White House. Republicans in the U.S. Senate, led by James Lankford of Oklahoma, developed a detailed and bipartisan proposal for increasing security along American's southern border earlier this year.
And then Trump killed it from the campaign trail for the most cynical of reasons. Any accomplishment during Biden's presidency would burnish his record while eliminating a political issue for Trump to exploit.
Trump has no new tricks. He has only his threadbare theatrics and his acrobatic attempts at dodging accountability. That's the show we'll be watching for four more years. You're kidding yourself if you think Trump cares about governing. He just wants to be on stage in the spotlight as the theater burns down around him.
Follow Paste BN elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan