WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump is back, baby.
The president-elect, who often blew up painstaking congressional negotiations with last-minute demands during his first presidency, on Wednesday torpedoed a bipartisan budget deal that would have kept the government open past Friday ― and he’s not even been sworn in to his second White House term yet.
In a statement posted online that took just about everyone in Washington by surprise, including members of his own party, Trump criticized a spending bill negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and called for an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit ― a controversial idea that Republicans typically use to demand concessions from Democrats, not the other way around.
He then threatened to primary “any Republican” who votes for a stopgap government funding bill unless it contains a debt limit extension, ratcheting up pressure on Johnson and other Republican members of Congress as they struggle to come up with an alternative plan to fund the government.
The debt ceiling demand took lawmakers of both parties by surprise and instantly made the funding standoff more complicated. There had been no discussion in recent weeks about the debt ceiling, which typically consumes months of negotiations and likely didn’t need to be addressed until mid-2025.
“This has come as a surprise to me,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I don’t know his rationale.”
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) called it “a bolt of lightning coming out of the sky,” while Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said it foreshadowed the chaos in Congress next year, especially in the House, where Republicans will hold an even smaller vote margin than they have this year.
“It is a taste of things to come. The House is going to be ungovernable,” Schiff, who served in the House before winning election to the Senate this year, told HuffPost.
Some senators struggled to find words when asked to comment on Trump’s last-minute demand. “I can’t even ― I really can’t even,” is all Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) could manage to say before jumping into a Senate elevator.
Asked for her reaction to the latest developments, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) offered an astute pair of words: “Chaos ensues!” She had nothing more to say.
Republicans, meanwhile, expressed doubts that Trump’s debt limit gambit would work given the precious hours left before government funding expires on Friday, the eve of the Christmas holiday break.
GOP senators from states wracked by devastating storms put greater emphasis on the inclusion of disaster aid into any bill that keeps the government’s lights on. The bill negotiated by Johnson provided $100 billion to do so, but now even that funding could be in jeopardy.
“To anybody who thinks that disaster relief is pork, come to where I live, see what happened in my state, in North Carolina and Georgia,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters, referring to criticism of the spending provisions in Johnson’s bill.
Any spending bill ― whether it includes a debt limit hike or not ― will require bipartisan support, especially in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Democrats on Wednesday accused Trump and billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who savaged Johnson’s bill online as too costly, of essentially pushing for a government shutdown.
“We have a deal with Republicans and we’re sticking with it,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told his members on Wednesday after Trump demanded a new budget bill, according to a source familiar with his conversations.
The unexpected spending fiasco has put Johnson in hot water with conservatives and raised questions about his future as speaker. Several of his Republican colleagues threatened to dump him over his handling of the situation. The speaker also irked Trump himself, according to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who spoke to the president-elect earlier on Wednesday.
One GOP senator who spoke on the condition of anonymity expressed concern about Johnson’s standing and the possibility of even more chaos in the House.
“They might have just gotten Mike Johnson beat for speaker,” the senator told HuffPost. “You want to see real chaos? You watch this monster over there have to pick a new speaker.”
