Trump’s Shutdown Threat Is a Loyalty Test for GOP Lawmakers

The president-elect couldn’t wait until he’s in office to screw up Washington with angry demands. Photo: Allison Robbert/AFP/Getty Images

MAGA Republicans in Congress have been eagerly looking forward to the second Trump administration and the broad and often radical agenda they plan to help the 47th president enact. But before he’s even sworn in, Donald Trump has suddenly instructed them to instantly pass fiscal measures most of them are really going to hate.

On December 18, months of bipartisan planning for a stopgap spending bill to keep the federal government operating until March went down the tubes as the ever-meddling Elon Musk, and then Trump himself, trashed the measure when it was on the brink of a House vote. Speaker Mike Johnson was forced to withdraw the bill, and now a government shutdown at midnight on Friday looks very likely.

That was bad enough for congressional Republicans eager to get home for the holidays. But then Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance issued an entirely new demand: passage of a “clean” stopgap bill (i.e., one stripped of all the sweeteners Democrats had secured in exchange for their votes, including urgently needed disaster funds and farm assistance) with a debt-limit increase thrown in:

This was news Congress could not use. The statutory debt limit, which was suspended for two years via a bipartisan agreement in 2023, will be breached by the federal government next year (likely in June, according to most estimates). The Republicans who will be running Congress in January had planned to deal with the debt limit as part of some much larger springtime measure, probably a budget reconciliation bill that will include extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. But now we learn Trump has been grumbling about having to deal with the debt limit at all. So now he’s insisting that Republicans (many of whom have never voted for a debt-limit measure in their entire careers) pass it right now or stand accused by their leader of a “betrayal of our country.”

Some of the same hard-core MAGA Republicans who hate debt-limit increases also habitually vote against any spending measures (and certainly the “clean” stopgap bill Trump is talking about) that aren’t accompanied by deep domestic-spending cuts. But they can’t be given a “pass” to vote against Trump’s wishes, because Democrats are not about to provide any votes for a bill that abandons the deal they made with Johnson. And even if nearly all GOP House members bend the knee and vote for this package that they will hate, they have only a three-vote margin of control of the chamber and don’t control the Senate or the White House at all until next month.

Why should Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cooperate in this intensely partisan GOP maneuver? Why would President Joe Biden sign the package if it somehow reaches his desk? There’s really no answer to these questions, which is why Trump is essentially asking his troops to walk the plank and cast pointless votes for more spending and debt that won’t even keep the government open, since it’s doomed to fail.

Worst of all, this order from Trump is now in the hands of the one Republican in Washington with the least political capital available: Mike Johnson, whom nearly everyone in both parties is blaming for inept handling of the stopgap spending bill that has now imploded so spectacularly. Either Trump double-crossed Johnson by approving the deals with Democrats that went into the bill and then reversing himself when Musk decided to stir up MAGA-land into a revolt, or Johnson got assurances from Trump underlings without confirming it with the Big Guy. Either way, the Louisianan looks like a hapless schmo right now, just 15 days before the House is scheduled to elect a Speaker for the new 119th Congress.

The congressional GOP is in a fix, all right, and the president-elect has now made it much worse. While the situation is bad for the government employees who will likely be furloughed for an indefinite period of time, it’s quite the surprising holiday gift for Democrats who are in a position to stand back and watch as the so recently triumphant GOP tries to find its way out of an entirely self-imposed trap.