Congress avoids shutdown, but this Trump-Musk whiplash is only a preview | Opinion
After all that noise from President-elect Trump and his buddy Elon Musk, Congress managed to do its job. But this isn't over.

This column was updated with latest information.
President-elect Donald Trump, following the lead of his edgelord chancellor Elon Musk, has given congressional Democrats a gift that appears to keep on giving – a preview of the chaos to come.
That came in the shape of a looming government shutdown that was averted in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday evening, just six hours before the midnight deadline when government funding expires.
The House bill to avoid a shutdown was sent to the Senate for consideration, where it was overwhelmingly affirmed (if 38 minutes past the deadline into early Saturday). President Joe Biden signed it into law later that day.
Call this the ghosts of Christmas past and future, because Trump notoriously pushed the government into the nation's longest government shutdown just three days before Christmas in 2018.
Past is prologue here. Trump was always an unreliable ally from the start of his first term as president, when Republicans controlled the House and Senate but could not count on him as a team player. Now we know it will be more of the same after his inauguration.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk will bring their brand of nonsense to Congress
House Republicans on Thursday evening added to the gift that Musk and Trump gave to Democrats – rejecting the president-elect's slapdash efforts to hijack a government funding bill – extending the nation's debt ceiling for two years.
That provision was removed Friday in a second vote, when most Democrats joined with Republicans to pass a slimmed-down bill to keep the government funded.
Pushing off the debt ceiling would have made it easier for Trump to push for massive tax breaks for billionaires – sounds nice, right Elon? – that would punch a larger hole in the country's finances that would inevitably increase the deficit.
The debt ceiling is a set limit on how much America can borrow to pay its debts. A higher ceiling allows for bigger tax breaks because it allows the government to borrow more to replace the money rich people would have paid in taxes.
Instead, we got the needless tumult of a potential shutdown five days before Christmas.
Republicans stay on brand and immediately blame Democrats
Think Trump cares? Don't be foolish. Expect him to take responsibility? Not a chance. Trump spent Friday morning desperately trying to rewrite this week's history, posting on social media that the crisis he created was really somehow Biden's fault.
Here again, Trump was following the lead of others. House Speaker Mike Johnson, after reneging on a bipartisan deal with Democrats to fund the government until mid-March, tried to reframe his colossal failure Thursday night as some sort of betrayal by Democrats.
The part Johnson left unsaid? His parliamentary maneuver to push Trump's wish list instead of the negotiated deal required two-thirds of the House members to go along with that plan. Instead, 38 Republicans told Johnson and Trump to go stuff their 11th-hour bid to push off the debt ceiling.
JD Vance, the vice president-elect, tried to claim Democrats "asked for a shutdown." He spouted that nonsense about 12 hours before his new boss literally asked for a shutdown on social media.
That's a repeated theme from Trump's first term – his allies try to defend him but he can't help but upend those efforts through his own, contradictory commentary.
Johnson double-crossed Democrats, spiking cancer research for kids and lower drug costs in the process
No piece of legislation is perfect. Deals have to be made in a divided government. The Democrats control the White House and U.S. Senate until next month. Burning them on an agreement, then developing a new proposal without their input, was always going to fail.
The deal Johnson tanked had some features that were easy to cast as problematic, including a 3.8% raise for members of Congress. Musk couldn't deal with the facts, so he had to exaggerate that on his social media cesspool X, claiming it was a 40% raise. That was just one of more than 100 posts Musk used to circulate disinformation about the original deal in his bid to derail it.
But plenty of worthy stuff died when Johnson double-crossed Democrats to please Trump. One item that won plenty of attention: $126 million to fund research for pediatric cancer treatment for 10 years. The Senate, in a separate vote Friday night, rescued that funding.
But lost were also provisions to lower the costs of prescription drugs and to stop concert and sporting event ticket sellers and hotels from adding hidden fees onto bills. There was even a section boosting the Department of Homeland Security's ability to crack down on the recent controversy about drone sightings.
I guess none of that matters to billionaires and their puppet president-elects when fat, juicy tax breaks are on the horizon.
Government shutdowns, or the threats for them, come and go. They're usually a symptom of partisan division, a sign that Democrats and Republicans hold power but cannot wield it together.
Not here. This is just the chaos of Trump, preening for attention, failing to consider consequences, so thirsty for the approval of people like Musk that he can't see the disapproval he sets off in everyone else.
That's a gift the Democrats can't afford to waste. They need to bang on with the message that Trump offers only four years of turmoil. Nothing more.
Follow Paste BN elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan