Welcome to the new Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The president-elect and the world’s richest man combined Wednesday to smash a short-term spending compromise orchestrated by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the government open until early in Trump’s new term.
The stop-gap measure is packed with nearly $100 billion in aid for Americans hit by multiple national disasters, economic aid for farmers, a federal commitment to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and a criminalization of revenge porn.
But the Trump-Musk blocking maneuver plunged the capital into one of its classic year-end crises, pitched Johnson’s hopes of keeping his job into extreme doubt and offered a preview of the chaos that may churn in Trump’s second term.
A sense of turmoil was exacerbated by the 10th straight day of losses on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, matching a mark set in the Ford administration. The selloffs underlined a volatile national moment and some of the economic challenges Trump may face after the Federal Reserve warned that inflation will tick up next year.
The sabotaging of Johnson’s funding initiative triggered shock and confusion on Capitol Hill. But for many of Trump’s supporters and boosters in the conservative media who are anticipating massive cuts to federal programs, the mayhem is the point. Even if the impasse leads to a damaging government shutdown, that may represent progress for some since the government itself is viewed with disdain on the populist right. And by taking aim at the Washington status quo even before he takes the oath of office, Trump is doing exactly what he said he’d do on the campaign trail.
But the sudden imbroglio also highlighted one of the key issues facing Trump in his second term: If he wants to pass his tax cuts, push through his immigration overhauls, defend the country and leave a meaningful legacy, he will have to find some way to govern – even if that draws him into conflict with base voters and MAGA ideologues who seem happy to burn government to the ground.
Johnson was meeting with a small group of GOP lawmakers on Thursday morning as he tries to figure a way out of his own — and his party’s — self-inflicted impasse. But some of Trump’s top supporters were embracing Musk’s previous call to shut down the government entirely until the new president’s inauguration on January 20.
On X, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote “I’m all in” and warned that Republicans should stand firm to stop the “madness,” even if it meant electing new leadership. Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett wrote on X, “Shut it down.” And Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on the Musk-owned social network that if there was no plan, “Let’s reset Jan. 20th.”
Musk-style governance
The mega disruptor largely responsible for the uproar is Musk. In his biography of the SpaceX pioneer, Walter Isaacson described the philosophy of the president-elect’s new super buddy as, “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat.”
The rocket mogul lived up to that mantra on Wednesday, unleashing assaults on Johnson’s plans before dawn. “This bill should not pass,” Musk wrote on X, opening a 70-post blast that slammed the bill as full of “pork” spending and warning that anyone who voted for it should be ditched in the 2026 election.
Musk whipped up opposition to the bill all day, driving fury on MAGA media outlets, before Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance issued a late afternoon statement demanding a streamlined spending bill without Democratic deliverables. And exacerbating the pandemonium on Capitol Hill, they added another huge condition — for Congress to raise the government’s borrowing ceiling while Joe Biden is still president — a massive challenge at short notice.
It was not immediately clear how closely Trump and Musk were coordinating. But the timeline of Musk’s pressure and the president-elect’s belated entry into the public fray offered demoralized Democrats an opening. New York Rep. Dan Goldman conjured a scenario on X clearly calculated to get under the president-elect’s skin. “As the shadow Pres-Elect, Elon Musk is now calling the shots for House Rs on government funding while Trump hides in Mar-a-Lago behind his handlers,” Goldman wrote. “It increasingly seems like we’re in for 4 years of an unelected oligarch running the country by pulling on his puppet’s strings.”