Trump Is Desperately Trying to Shift Blame for Impending Shutdown

Donald Trump is desperate to pretend his shoddy leadership isn’t about to cause a government shutdown.

A “clean” spending bill, which contained a Trump-requested provision to suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, failed to pass on the House floor Thursday evening, earning just 174 votes in favor and 235 against.

Trump tried to push the blame onto President Joe Biden, in a Truth Social post Friday.

“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’” wrote the president-elect. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”

But it’s not clear that Republicans are interested in solving anything. Thirty-eight Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against the pared-down bill, and a good portion of those GOP lawmakers spent the preceding 36 hours cheering on a shutdown alongside Elon Musk, the billionaire trying to run Congress through threats to oust elected officials.

Now Trump’s not even really trying to avert a shutdown but simply hoping that no one will blame him for it.

Government funding is set to expire at midnight.

Mike Johnson is about to be hoist by his own petard, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t coming to the rescue this time.

During a press conference Thursday with House Democratic leaders, Jeffries was asked whether his party would consider voting for Johnson to retain the speakership amid a Republican “revolt,” if the speaker were to put something “amiable” in his continuing resolution.

“No,” Jeffries answered flatly.

The House minority leader spoke harshly about Republicans’ antics, which upended the hefty bipartisan spending bill that would have funded the government until March.

“That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government, and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help,” Jeffries said.

CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju posted on X that sources in a closed-door meeting said that Jeffries and other top Democrats have been “conveying to their members that they are in no mood to bail out Speaker Johnson from the spending drama after Donald Trump’s late demands.”

Raju wrote that Johnson had yet to connect with Jeffries since the original spending bill collapsed, and that Johnson was seeking a way forward among GOP members, who don’t exactly seem to be in agreement.

Late Wednesday, almost 24 hours after the 1,547-page bill had been released and Republicans had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Trump finally responded to the bill, demanding that House Republicans find a way to raise the debt ceiling—or abolish it altogether, he said later.

Jeffries previously moved to save Johnson’s job when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to have him ousted in April, dismissing her motion to remove the Louisiana Republican as “pro-Putin Republican obstruction.”

While House Democrats sought to minimize the chaos eight months ago, their will to fight for the embattled Johnson to retain his gavel appears to have greatly diminished. And this time, Greene’s floated replacing Johnson with Elon Musk.

By Thursday evening, the image of a new “clean” continuing resolution began to emerge. This bill would suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, until January 2027, as Trump had requested. It would also give $110 billion in disaster aid and extend the farm bill, while cutting some other provisions, such as one promoting the sale of high-ethanol gasoline.

House Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy has no intentions of backing down after Donald Trump personally singled him out in a threat to get with the program on the spending bill.

The president-elect cut through an unusually quiet day from him to directly attack the Republican representative, suggesting he could be primaried next if he doesn’t fall in line.

“The very unpopular ‘Congressman” from Texas, Chip Roy, is getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory—All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself. Republican obstructionists have to be done away with. The Democrats are using them, and we can’t let that happen,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “Weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics, and as to Making America Great Again.”

“Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent. By the way, how’s Bob Good doing?” he continued in another post, referencing the Republican representative from Virginia who Trump helped oust in the primaries. “I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won’t have a chance!”

Roy likely became Trump’s target of the day after being unsatisfied with how far the spending cuts went in the last spending bill. But despite Trump’s direct threat, Roy held his ground in a message directed to the president.

“My position is simple—I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it,” Roy wrote on X. “I’ve been negotiating to that end. No apologies. CC: @realDonaldTrump @SpeakerJohnson @SenJohnThune @freedomcaucus.”

Trump on Thursday suggested outright abolishing the country’s debt ceiling, something that clearly makes the conservative Roy uncomfortable. On Tuesday, Roy introduced the DOGE Act to further cut federal spending on nonmilitary programs.

“We’re working right now on how to actually cut spending, which is what the voters sent me to Washington to do. So that’s what we’re working on,” Roy told the media when asked about Trump’s threat.

The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday, based on interviews with nearly 50 people knowledgeable of the operations of the Biden White House. The story details the extent to which the president’s age has posed an issue throughout his presidency, including from the very start, and the lengths to which aides went to conceal it.

President Biden, now 82, was 78 years old when he took office, and the Journal reports that administration officials began to notice signs of his age “in just the first few months of his term,” as he would grow “tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”

Those who met with the president were reportedly told that “exchanges should be short and focused.” Meetings were strategically scheduled and, sometimes, if Biden “was having an off day,” they were simply canceled. A former aide recalled a national security official saying, regarding one rescheduled meeting, “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”

The Journal reported that lawmakers, Cabinet members, and the public all seemed to have less face time with the president than in previous administrations and that senior advisers were “often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.” Namely, administration officials like Jake Sullivan, Steve Ricchetti, and Lael Brainard frequently functioned as intermediaries for the president.

House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith reportedly sought to reach Biden ahead of his withdrawal from Afghanistan “but couldn’t get on the phone with him.” Smith noted that he was more frequently in touch with Barack Obama when he was president, though he wasn’t then the House Armed Services chair. Representative Jim Hines, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, similarly told the Journal, “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior.”

As for Biden and his Cabinet members, the Journal reports that interactions “were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted.” One reportedly gave up on trying to request calls with him altogether “because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome.” The report reveals too that Biden struggled to “recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him” as he prepared for his interview with special counsel Robert Hur—who was investigating whether Biden mishandled classified material and in February determined that a jury would consider him “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

On the 2024 campaign trail, the report says, Biden’s team often vetted questions from event attendees in advance. Pollsters for the campaign were also seemingly kept at arm’s length: The Journal reports that “Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him,” as the president often seemed unaware of the ample polling showing he was trailing Trump.

Years of such incidents culminated in Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. President-elect Donald Trump will, like Biden, be 78 at his inauguration and 82 by the end of his term.

The Georgia appeals court’s decision to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the 2020 election interference case against Trump has launched the ongoing case into chaos. State officials must now find someone to fill her role, a process that could, at best, bring things to a screeching halt—or kill the case altogether.

The court announced Thursday that it had overturned a decision by Judge Scott McAfee allowing Willis to remain on the case after she faced accusations of having an improper relationship with Nathan Wade, her special prosecutor. McAfee said Willis could remain on the case if she cut ties with Wade.

Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants had appealed the ruling, and the Georgia appeals court decided that the “appearance of impropriety” was just too much. While the indictment would not be dismissed, Willis’s “disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” according to Thursday’s court filing.

The appeals court’s decision doesn’t just knock Willis out of the driver’s seat, though—it disqualifies her entire office from trying the case.

Willis’s office filed a notice Thursday afternoon indicating that it intends to appeal the court’s decision, which, if taken up, could move the case to Georgia’s Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, will be responsible for determining who will take up the task of prosecuting the president-elect and his co-defendants, Lawfare’s senior editor Anna Bower wrote on X. But she warned that’s easier said than done.

“Realistically, it will be quite difficult to find another prosecutor who would be willing to take on this case. *If* the appeals court decision is not overturned by the GA Supreme Court, this likely spells the end of the prosecution against Trump and others in Fulton County,” Bower wrote.

Trump is rushing to remind the media that he is the captain of the GOP, not Elon Musk.

The “President Musk” rhetoric gained steam among Democrats after the billionaire helped kill the continuing resolution to keep the government open, voicing his opposition long before the president-elect did.

But Trump wants the world to know he’s still the one calling the shots.

“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, as reported by Business Insider’s Bryan Metzger.

The statement may be a sign of growing friction between Trump and the world’s richest man, who backed his return to the White House.

Musk has been threatening Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, about the spending bill, even as the prospect of a government shutdown looms. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” the SpaceX CEO and Department of Government Efficiency co-lead posted on Wednesday.

“It’s not Donald Trump asking for this, it’s very clearly President Elon Musk asking for this,” Representative Dan Goldman said Wednesday on The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell. “The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure about this budget deal, all of a sudden, Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal.”

There’s no telling just yet how much of a rift this has caused between the two men, as Musk seems to be a long-term fixture in Trump’s inner circle. But if this kind of public one-upping continues, who knows how long this bromance will last.

Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth still isn’t in the clear just yet—and now even Republicans want to see the receipts. 

At least 12 senators have requested to review the FBI’s background check on Hegseth, according to Politico. While Hegseth’s nomination was believed to be safe earlier this month after a media blitz by his mother and a few laps around the Senate, this surprising development suggests otherwise. 

Hegseth’s background check was initially delayed by Trump’s refusal to sign key transition documents but is now likely to be completed before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on January 14.  

“It would be helpful, given the allegations that have been lodged against Mr. Hegseth, to be able to see the FBI background check,” Republican Senator Susan Collins told Politico. 

“I’m going to see it,” said Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville. 

Usually two senators handle this kind of check, but the litany of allegations against Hegseth has prompted more attention on his confirmation. 

The former Fox & Friends host is accused of sexual assault, harassment, financial mismanagement of two different veterans’ groups, and workplace misconduct, including intoxication and sexism.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has thrown her weight behind Senator Rand Paul’s ridiculous proposal that Elon Musk be elected the speaker of the House of Representatives.

“The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Paul posted Thursday morning on X. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk … think about it … nothing’s impossible. (not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”

Quote-tweeting Paul’s proposal approvingly, Greene wrote that she would be “open to supporting” Musk for the speakership.

“DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning [sic] in Congress to enact real government efficiency,” Greene wrote, referring to the austerity agenda of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory panel to be co-led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. “The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”

On Thursday afternoon, according to Daily Mail reporter Jon Michael Raasch, Greene emailed her constituents a survey asking if they would support Musk as House speaker. “DOGE could become the legislative branch,” the accompanying message says. The congresswoman posed the same question in a poll on Musk’s platform, X, which has garnered over 57,000 votes by the time of writing—82.7 percent of which are in favor of him getting the gavel.

If Paul and Greene were to have it their way, Musk would be the first nonmember to hold the speakership.

Musk has been crusading against Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan spending bill to avert a government shutdown. On Wednesday, the billionaire sent over 100 tweets on X railing against the bill—with “a number of misleading or outright false claims,” per Politico—and expressing indifference about the prospect of a shutdown.

Musk’s efforts culminated in President-elect Trump coming out against the bill, dealing “a likely deathblow” to budget negotiations, per the Associated Press. As Trump and Musk send the government hurtling toward a shutdown, many observers have criticized elected officials for taking marching orders from an unelected billionaire.

Amid this wrangling, the right-wing populist House Freedom Caucus, of which Greene is a member, expressed its dissatisfaction with the proposed bill, touting instead Representative Chip Roy’s proposed DOGE Act, which would slash federal spending—though not, of course, the Pentagon budget.

There’s scarcely a better illustration of Greene’s phony brand of populism than her support for installing the world’s richest man to, as she put it, reign in the people’s elected body.

This story has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has begun the steady descent out of Donald Trump’s favor.

A source close to Trump told NOTUS Thursday that the president-elect initially supported Johnson’s plan to keep the government funded, but was surprised to find that the whopping 1,547-page bill was filled with plans to spend billions of dollars on Democratic priorities, farmers, and disaster relief.

Senator Josh Hawley told CNN Wednesday that Trump had said Johnson had not told him everything in the massive spending bill.

Trump has been a staunch ally of the Louisiana Republican, including in May when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to have him removed from the speakership. Johnson has remained cozy with the president-elect, but all of that could change in the wake of his continuing resolution, which is particularly unpopular with unofficial, unelected co-President Elon Musk.

Trump’s defection could spell trouble for Johnson, who needs to be speedily reelected next year so that Congress can go on to certify the results of the presidential election.

Trump spoke with Fox Digital Thursday and indicated that Johnson would have no trouble getting reelected … so long as he is able to clean up the spending bill.

“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, members of Johnson’s own party appear to have already moved on. Representative Thomas Massie said Wednesday night he would not vote for Johnson as speaker in January, and some lawmakers are even suggesting Musk as a potential replacement.

Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, surprising Democrats and Republicans alike.

The shocking demand comes as the president-elect revealed his opposition to the bipartisan spending bill, bringing the federal government another step closer to a shutdown.

Trump told NBC News over the phone that it would be the “smartest thing” Congress could do.

“I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said.

He went on to assert that the debt ceiling is a frivolous, imaginary concept intended to scare people into abiding by it. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said.

This isn’t necessarily new for Trump, who signed laws to lift the debt ceiling three separate times during his first term while also suggesting the debt ceiling be killed off in 2017. “It complicates things, it’s really not necessary,” he said of the debt ceiling then.

Still, it goes against the rest of his party, as Republicans often campaign against raising the debt ceiling, let alone abolishing it entirely. That’s not the case with Democrats. Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle has been advocating for his Debt Ceiling Reform Act since 2023, a law that would weaken Congress’s ability to use shutdown as a threat to pass legislation. The bill currently has 55 Democratic Party co-sponsors.

Already, at least one Democrat has backed Trump’s demand.

“I agree with President-elect Trump that Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X.