Last week, when President-elect Trump and his new colleague Elon Musk, launched a last-minute effort to head off passage of a continuing resolution that was needed to prevent a government shutdown, that had been loaded down with unnecessary pork-barrel government spending. This tested their ability to control the Republican majority in the House of Representatives by applying pressure through social media.
While they succeeded in eliminating most of the excess spending from the bill, Trump’s will was defied by 38 rebellious GOP conservative House members who rejected his demand that they suspend the federal debt ceiling to pave the way for Trump’s tax-cutting legislative agenda after he takes over the White House on January 20.
The near-euphoric post-election mood in Trump’s camp was briefly replaced by finger-pointing and intraparty squabbling just one month before Trump takes office, and revealed the amount of work that Trump and his supporters still need do to unite all of the GOP lawmakers in Washington behind his agenda, especially in the House, where the GOP’s new working majority will be razor thin.
The feared partial government shutdown was averted at the last minute when Democrats agreed to pass a slimmed-down version of the continuing resolution (CR) which provided funding for the federal government at current levels until March 14, 2025, along with measures to provide $100 billion for emergency hurricane disaster relief and $10 billion in economic aid for farmers, both of which had enjoyed broad bipartisan support. But the continuing resolution which Joe Biden signed into law a few hours after the government shutdown had technically begun contained no mention of the debt ceiling and had been stripped of most of the extraneous spending proposals that had been proposed by the Democrats over Republican objections, including a pay raise for members of Congress.
MUSK’S GROWING INFLUENCE ON GOVERNMENT POLICY
It was Musk, rather than Trump who led the initial attack on the 1,547-page stopgap spending bill, which was characteristically revealed by GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson after negotiating it with Senate Democrats just three days before government funding was due to expire. In a tweet Musk issued to millions of his followers on his X social platform a few hours later, at 4:15 a.m., he declared, “This bill should not pass.” Musk’s objections to the giveaways in the CR were repeated 12 hours later by President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, who insisted publicly for the first time that the revised legislation include an immediate two-year extension to the federal debt limit which otherwise will be reached shortly after he takes office.
While the extent of the coordination between Trump and Musk in attacking the original CR was not immediately apparent, senior Democrats, including Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was one of the leaders of the impeachment efforts against Donald Trump, complained that Musk, who has been designated by Trump, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), was already exerting a dangerous amount of influence over government policy for an unelected private citizen, regardless of his great wealth.
The debt ceiling issue also provided an accurate early measure of the strength of Trump’s support among House Republicans, many of whom have previously refused to vote for increases in the debt ceiling because they signal support for increased government spending to come.
The conservative Republican opposition to the Trump-backed version of the CR containing the debt ceiling extension and funding for hurricane relief and farmers was led by Congressman Chip Roy of Texas. He warned his Republican colleagues “You never have any ounce of self-respect to go out and campaign, saying you’re going to balance the budget and then you come in here and pass $110 billion unpaid for [in the continuing resolution]. It’s embarrassing, it’s shameful.” Even though Trump warned Roy that he would support a Republican primary challenger against him when he runs for re-election in two years if he did not back off from his objections, Roy voted against the Trump version of the continuing resolution.
38 REPUBLICANS DEFY TRUMP’S DEBT CEILING DEMAND
But after the Trump version of the resolution was voted down in the House by all but 2 Democrats and 38 Republicans, a third version of the bill was crafted without the debt ceiling extension. It won the support of members of both parties by a 366-34 vote, (all of the opponents being Republicans) just a few hours before the shutdown deadline.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also supported the third version, arguing that its surviving spending provisions were good enough, and hailing the decision to remove Trump’s request to suspend the federal debt ceiling until January 2027.
The Senate quickly followed the House’s example. It voted half an hour before midnight, by 85-11, to send the bill to Biden for his signature into law, which ended the partial government shutdown just a few hours after it had technically begun.
Shortly after that version passed the House, Speaker Johnson said, “This is America First legislation because it allows us to be set up to deliver for the American people. In January, we will make a sea change in Washington. President Trump will return to D.C. and the White House, and we will have Republican control of the Senate and the House. Things are going to be very different around here. This was a necessary step to bridge the gap.”
GOP SPEAKER JOHNSON THREADS THE NEEDLE
At that point, Elon Musk reversed his earlier criticism and praised Speaker Johnson for quickly crafting an acceptable stripped-down version of the bloated spending legislation. “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” Musk wrote on X. “It went from a [1547-page] bill that weighed pounds to a [118-page] bill that weighed ounces.”
At least one senior Democrat congressional aide privately gave Speaker Johnson credit for successfully navigating an incredibly difficult political landscape to finally pass the continuing resolution that would keep the federal government in full operation through the year-end holiday season and give Trump a couple of months of legislative breathing room after being inaugurated, even though the trial and error last-minute legislative process was not pretty.
“I think he just knew that people would blame him and the GOP — but he was juggling all that with wanting to keep the [Speaker’s] gavel, while being hit with asteroids launched by Elon Musk,” the aide said.
Back in May, congressional Democrats also came to Johnson’s rescue when a small group of conservative House Republicans, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, tried to oust him as Speaker, as they had successfully done to Kevin McCarthy the previous October. Also, despite the conservative criticism of Speaker Johnson for initially agreeing to the first bloated continuing resolution, it still appears he will be re-elected as Speaker when the newly elected Congress convenes for the first time on January 3, since no competing GOP candidate for Speaker has yet to come forward.
TRUMP MAKES HIS CASE AGAINST THE DEBT CEILING
Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC News, followed by a statement on his Truth Social media platform, Trump defended his desire to do away with the debt ceiling 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. It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” Trump told NBC.
“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous debt ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, [it puts] pressure on whoever is President,” Trump messaged to his followers.
After agreeing to support the continuing resolution without the debt ceiling measure that Trump wanted, the House GOP majority hopes to raise the debt limit in the next Congress by $1.5 trillion and to cut $2.5 trillion in federal spending, by using a special budget “reconciliation” procedure which bypasses the Senate’s 60-vote requirement to avoid a filibuster. Congressional Republicans have also been debating whether to include Trump’s new tax cut proposals as well as the renewal of his expiring 2017 tax cuts in the same reconciliation bill with his aggressive border control and illegal immigrant deportation measures, or try to pass them as two separate measures.
Most GOP senators prefer a two-bill strategy, starting with the passage of a border-control bill that enjoys wide support, and then using that momentum to help pass more complex major tax cut legislation.
But GOP Congressman Jason Smith of Missouri, the chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, wants to put both sets of proposals together in the same legislative package. That is because he and other Republicans see the portion of the larger bill that would keep Trump’s 2017 tax cuts from expiring as must-pass legislation; without it, many American households and businesses would see a major tax increase in 2026.
It will be up to Speaker Johnson to keep enough House Republicans in line to pass Trump’s ambitious legislative agenda with the razor-thin 220-215 GOP majority in the newly elected Congress. While the GOP’s 53-47 majority in the Senate is somewhat more comfortable, especially with J.D. Vance as Vice President available to cast a tie-breaking vote if necessary, it still would only take the revolt of a handful of GOP conservative zealots, led by Chip Roy and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House, and Republican moderates Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in the Senate, to sabotage the passage of Trump’s proposals.
CAN SPEAKER JOHNSON DUPLICATE PELOSI’S SUCCESS?
While the challenge facing Johnson in keeping almost all rebellious House Republican conservatives such as Chip Roy and Margarette Taylor Greene in line to pass Trump’s agenda will be formidable, it has been done before, such as when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was able to supply President Joe Biden with consistent Democrat majorities for his liberal legislative agenda working with a narrow numerical margin that was not much larger than the one that Speaker Johnson will have to work with.
Once he is inaugurated as president on January 20, it will be up to Trump to use his clear mandate from the voters to unify the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress in support of his proposals.
As Ohio Republican Congressman Max Miller told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re going to need a lot of help from President Trump and the rest of the Republican Party to keep this together. We really need his influence here in Congress and his leadership throughout this body. Otherwise, we may not be as successful as we thought we were going to be.”
TRUMP STARTING HIS SECOND TERM STRONGER
In January, Trump will be starting his second term as president in a much stronger position than he did in January 2017, when his narrow Electoral College-only victory over Hillary Clinton was widely viewed as a political fluke. In addition, because of Trump’s lack of prior government experience, many Americans had doubts about his ability to do the job.
But during his second time around as President-elect, Trump is enjoying the traditional post-election political honeymoon that he was denied following his 2016 victory. A Quinnipiac University national poll released on December 18 showed that voters are more optimistic than pessimistic about the next four years with Trump as president, by a 53% to 42% margin.
Because Trump won the national popular vote by a margin of 2.2 million, as well as a clean sweep of all of the battleground states, turning the Democrats’ rust belt “blue wall” red, Americans have widely accepted his second term as president as legitimate. So far, the public also seems to be looking favorably at Trump’s preparations to keep his promise to shake up the federal government by reversing the many failed policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
The polls have shown that most American voters have reassessed Trump’s performance during his first term in office and have a much better opinion of him today than they did four years ago, especially in light of their displeasure with the Biden-Harris record of spiking inflation and immigration chaos at the border. Similarly, during the month since his electoral triumph, Trump’s popularity as president-elect has noticeably improved, breaking the 50% job approval barrier for the first time.
SUPPORT FOR TRUMP’S UNCONVENTIONAL PERSONNEL PICKS
There is a surprising level of approval for Trump’s unconventional nominations to his cabinet and to run many federal agencies, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a crusading reformer and vaccine skeptic, who has long been an outspoken critic of the corporate-dominated American health care establishment and an advocate for major changes in the federal government’s medical research, public health, and nutritional policies and priorities.
The entrenched Washington political establishment elites were also aghast at Trump’s nomination of outsider Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. Even though Hegseth is a decorated veteran who has dedicated much of his post-military career to advocating for veterans, he is (rightfully) seen as a threat to the interventionist foreign policy of the globalists who encouraged the United States to become ensnared in nation-building efforts and nearly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In promoting Trump’s America-First policies, Hegseth will have an important ally in Trump’s unconventional pick of former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. A veteran herself, Gabbard has been a consistent critic of America’s post-Cold War neoconservative foreign policy, even when it put her own political career at risk.
On the home front, Trump’s choice of former Florida state attorney general Pam Bondi brings the perfect mixture of talent, experience, and determination to clean up the politically corrupted Department of Justice that has weaponized the federal criminal justice system to go after Trump and his supporters. The same can also be said of Trump’s pick of Kash Patel to replace Christopher Wray as the director of the FBI which raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in a cynical effort to find any legal excuse to put the former president behind bars and prevent him from running for president in 2024.
ENTHUSIASM FOR TRUMP’S POLICY
The polls also show a high level of public support for most of the items on Trump’s policy agenda, including shutting down the border and starting to deport criminal illegal aliens, cutting personal tax rates and exempting tips, Social Security, and overtime income from taxation, reducing government spending, and ending many of the restrictions on domestic oil and natural gas drilling.
In addition, the strong post-election rally in the stock markets indicates that there is great enthusiasm in the business community in anticipation of Trump’s tax-cutting and deregulation policies, as well as his promises to create tariffs and other incentives to stimulate more investment in made-in-America industries. Whereas presidential candidate Kamala Harris proposed raising the top corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, making American companies less competitive in the international marketplace, Trump would slash the tax rate to 15%, significantly lower than the average in other industrialized economies, but only for companies which are manufacturing their products in the United States rather than abroad.
Trump hopes to avoid the necessity to avoid negotiating his tax cuts with Democrats by using reconciliation procedures to eliminate the requirement for a 60-vote Senate majority to break a Democrat filibuster. But if that doesn’t work out, it is possible that there could be a deal in which Trump’s tax cuts are allowed to pass in exchange for his agreement to eliminate the $10,000 cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions that was used to pay for Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and which has been a high priority for Democrats representing high-tax blue states.
TRUMP HAS LEARNED FROM HIS FIRST-TERM MISTAKES
Trump has also learned many lessons from the mistakes he made during his first term as president. This time, Trump expects to be able to get his administration up and running almost immediately. With his main policy goals already clearly set, and with full cooperation expected from the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump should be able to get most of his economic, law and order, and immigration policies in place by next summer. If they prove to be successful, his policies should start producing results that the voters can see in time to help Republicans maintain their current control over the House and Senate in the 2026 midterm elections.
Hopefully, with more people whom Trump knows and trusts installed in key positions throughout his administration, there will be much less of the chaos, internal bickering, and staff turnovers that served as a major distraction during Trump’s first term in office and tarnished his reputation as an effective president.
As president, Trump would also do well to stay closely attuned to the concerns and priorities of the working-class voters whose support was vital to his November electoral victory. He should also heed the lessons from the mistakes of the Biden administration, which prioritized the implementation of the woke agenda of the liberal elites, while largely ignoring the core economic needs and social priorities of most Americans. That is why President Biden’s initial popularity quickly plummeted after the Afghan withdrawal fiasco and inflation started to spike during the summer of 2021 and never recovered.
As John Halpin, the editor of the Liberal Patriot online publication writes, “Americans appear ready to give Donald Trump a fair chance to enact the economic and immigration policies he promised voters in 2024. If he wants to maintain their support over time, it will be incumbent upon him and his administration to keep these priorities front and center as they govern the nation while restraining their more partisan impulses.”
CHALLENGING TIMES FOR FRUSTRATED DEMOCRATS
These are challenging days for Democrats. Their largely muddled response to Trump’s clear mandate from the electorate on November 5 stands in sharp contrast with eight years ago when his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton mobilized infuriated Democrats to stage protest marches in the streets, challenge the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency and compete with one another to become Trump’s most vocal critic.
By contrast, many leading Democrats and their media advocates are taking a much more cautious approach in response to Trump’s election than they did in 2017. Some have publicly acknowledged they will have to work with Trump in some areas, while others, such as the liberal hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe news commentary program, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, have gone out of their way to visit with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in an obvious effort to mend their political fences with the president-elect.
One blue state Democratic governor recently conducted a poll of his constituents, asking them if they wanted the state government to work with Trump or oppose him. They responded in favor of working with Trump by a two-to-one margin, in sharp contrast to the broad participation of Democrats in the post-2016 election resistance movement to Trump’s presidency.
MORE COOPERATION AND LESS RESISTANCE
Other Democrats have publicly pledged to work with Trump during his second term in at least limited ways. For example, liberal California Congressman Ro Khanna has expressed interest in engaging with the Trump-endorsed cost-and-regulation cutting effort that will be led by Musk and Ramaswamy, which has been dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
While Khanna noted that there is a lack of detailed information about how that effort will work, “that is an opportunity for reform and renewal.”
Similarly, in a remarkably frank weekend interview with ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, Pennsylvania’s Democrat senator, John Fetterman, promised to keep an open mind about voting to confirm some of Trump’s more controversial cabinet nominees. Fetterman also emphasized that he hopes that Trump will be successful in his second term as president, and is not “rooting against him” as other Democrats have been doing.
“If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation. So country first. I know that’s become. . . a cliche, but it happens to be true,” Fetterman observed.
Fetterman, who has made headlines by being one of the few Democrats willing to meet with several of Trump’s cabinet picks as part of the confirmation process, said his Democratic colleagues need to “chill out” and stop condemning everything that president-elect Trump does or says.
IN BIDEN’S ABSENCE TRUMP IS THE DE FACTO PRESIDENT
Meanwhile, during their final two months in office, President Biden and Vice President Harris have virtually disappeared from public view. This has permitted president-elect Trump to fill the power and news vacuum they have created by acting as if he is already the de facto president. Every news cycle in the media is dominated by Trump’s daily meetings and conversations with world leaders and top business executives, and announcements of his unconventional picks to run his new administration that are deliberately intended to shake up the federal government. This is enabling the president-elect to reshape American domestic and foreign policies even before taking office. Trump also effectively exercised his informal veto power over the continuing resolution which was vital to keeping the federal government in operation during the transition, as it worked its way through the lame-duck Congress.
Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has demoralized many Democrats, and triggered a great deal of anxiety and second-guessing about where their 2024 campaign went wrong and how their party can recover in time to win the 2026 midterm and the 2028 presidential elections.
Democrats have yet to agree on a clear new political message for voters or on a new national party leader to deliver that message.
“There is no leadership now at the highest level,” said Tad Devine, a veteran Democrat strategist who has worked on numerous presidential campaigns.
Democrats, Devine said, need to find a simplified new message centered on economics from the point of view of most voters, while avoiding being drawn into culture wars with Republicans over the extreme positions of liberal racial and gender politics, the dispute over equity vs equality, and the forced implementation of highly unpopular DEI and climate change policies. Devine also said that the rigged outcomes of the 2024 and 2016 Democrat presidential nominating contests have stunted the political development of future party leaders.
DISPUTE OF WHY KAMALA HARRIS LOST TO TRUMP
There is also a vigorous ongoing debate among the various Democrat factions over the root causes behind Kamala Harris’ embarrassing electoral defeat. There has been a growing recognition by the remaining traditional mainstream Democrat leaders that the party’s policies are being dictated by its liberal elites who have become too fixated on identity politics.
At the same time, the party’s message largely ignored the needs and sensibilities of the working-class voters who had long served as the base of the Democrat voter coalition, and they responded either by defecting in large numbers to vote for Trump on November 5 or by deciding to stay home. This resulted not only in Harris’ defeat, but also in a major shortfall in the size of the Democrat vote, especially in the big blue states of California, New York, and New Jersey, as compared to four years ago.
However, the party’s liberal elite leadership is pushing back against these accusations, denying responsibility for Harris’ defeat and seeking to minimize the magnitude of Trump’s victory and his claim that it amounted to a clear mandate from American voters to roll back the Biden administration’s socialist-inspired woke liberal policies.
They argue that Harris lost primarily because she ran an ineffective campaign, and because the Biden administration failed to effectively convey the many successes of its policies to the American people. Instead, many formerly Democrat working-class voters became fixated on the high cost of living, for which they blamed Biden’s free-spending policies, and the conservative media hysteria over the results of the Biden administration’s open border policies.
WHEN WILL DEMOCRATS ADMIT TO THEIR BIDEN COVERUP?
However, almost totally lost in this internal Democrat policy debate, has been any sense of guilt or responsibility for the widespread Democrat conspiracy of silence and denial to cover up the evidence of Joe Biden’s serious cognitive decline since the start of his presidency, in which the mainstream news media was a willing participant. That was followed by a shockingly undemocratic process in which senior party leaders forced Joe Biden to drop out of his re-election campaign, and replaced him unilaterally with Vice President Kamala Harris, without allowing the party’s rank-and-file to choose any one of many better-qualified substitute candidates.
While Democrat party leaders continue to debate over which policy path the party should choose to recover the support of the millions of working-class voters they have lost, it is hard to imagine that the party can return to power unless it first admits that it deliberately deceived the voters over Joe Biden’s fitness for office, and then acts decisively to restore its lost credibility and trustworthiness.
