Trump threatens to primary Republicans who don’t support funding demands

The vice president-elect has come with his young son in tow to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s suite of offices at the Capitol.

Johnson has been huddled behind closed doors for hours as he races to rebuild a stopgap spending bill to prevent a government shutdown Friday.

Trump dumped a bipartisan package that would have kept the government funded and provided disaster aid to the states.

Republicans had mixed reactions to Trump’s insistence that an end of the year spending package also boost the debt ceiling to avoid an eventual default. But they generally deferred to the incoming president.

• “President Trump has made clear he would like to see that,” said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, who will be the No. 2 Republican next year. “I understand his reasoning.”
• Dealing with the debt ceiling now could give Trump “some runway to get his agenda implemented,” and Trump doesn’t want to be held “hostage” by that issue at the beginning of his term, North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd said. But he added that his state needs disaster money to help with recent flooding that was included in the bipartisan deal: “They need support and they need it right now and they need it this Congress.”
• Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., questioned how Congress could get the debt ceiling extended in two days before funding expires. However, he said, “I’m not sure how we do that.” The process normally takes months to negotiate, and many Republicans oppose increasing the debt limit. Rounds suggested that Congress should deal with it next year instead.

President Joe Biden’s White House is blaming Republicans for possible ramifications of a shutdown.

“Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in an evening statement.

Jean-Pierre called on Republicans to “keep their word,” warning that President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance had “ordered Republicans to shut down the government,” actions she said are “undermining communities recovering from disasters, farmers and ranchers, and community health centers.”

Trump is threatening to help mount challenges to any Republicans who “try to pass a clean Continuing Resolution without all of the Democrat ‘bells and whistles.’”

Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday that angling to pass such a measure after Jan. 20, when he takes office, would only “bring the mess of the Debt Limit into the Trump Administration, rather than allowing it to take place in the Biden Administration.”

A “clean CR” is essentially a bill that extends existing appropriations, at the same levels as the prior fiscal year.

Trump said in his post that the situation should be dealt with before he takes office, writing, “Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this should, and will, be Primaried.”

More than 8 in 10 Americans share the same view of both men, whether positive or negative. About half (49%) have an unfavorable view of both Musk and Trump, and about one-third (36%) have a favorable view of both men. Only about 1 in 10 have a positive view of Musk but not Trump, and another 1 in 10, roughly, like Trump but not Musk.

About 7 in 10 Republicans have a favorable view of Trump and Musk, and they’re more likely than independents and Democrats to feel this way. About 4 in 10 white Americans have a positive view of both men, compared with about one-third of Hispanic adults and about 2 in 10 Black adults.

Many Republicans expected to vote for a continuing resolution by Thursday and head home to their families by the end of the week.

Instead, by sundown Wednesday, many lawmakers were in the middle of holiday and year-end celebrations with staff when they saw posts from the president-elect, effectively killing a carefully negotiated deal between Democrats and Republicans.

“I’ve been here 14 years, okay? So nothing up here surprises me anymore,” Rep. Steve Womack, a senior GOP appropriator, said. “We shouldn’t be in this mess.”

The bill would have included $100.4 billion in aid to states affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and other natural disasters, such as the wildfire that devastated the Hawaii town of Lahaina in 2023.

Jeff Gilbreath, executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Community Lending, said the cost of rebuilding is so high that without those funds, many families would find it hard to stay in Lahaina.

“I would hope that we can rise above any sort of political division to recognize that families and communities are suffering immensely,” Gilbreath said. “And that we set aside those political differences to commit to make sure that the American people have access to the resources that are needed to recover from these very tragic disasters.”

President-elect Donald Trump says he’s determined to “fight ‘till the end” to get a debt limit increase from Congress. The end, alas, is probably a long ways off.

Congress last suspended the debt limit to January 2025 as part of a package negotiated by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Even though the bill was signed into law, some House Republicans said it didn’t go far enough, and it ended up costing McCarthy his job when eight Republicans sided with Democrats to oust him.

It took months for McCarthy to negotiate the last deal. Now Trump is looking for Johnson to pass a debt ceiling extension some 48 hours before a partial government shutdown.

The president-elect is continuing to voice his displeasure with what he calls “the ridiculous and extraordinarily expensive Continuing Resolution,” which he says is “dying fast.”

Trump asked in a post Wednesday evening on the social platform X if anyone could “imagine passing it without either terminating, or extending, the Debt Ceiling guillotine coming up in June?”

Trump accused “Radical Left Democrats” of trying to “embarrass us in June when it comes up for a Vote,” saying he will “fight ‘till the end” unless Democrats “terminate or substantially extend the Debt Ceiling now.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government can borrow to meet its existing legal obligations. In June 2023, lawmakers enacted legislation to suspend the debt limit through Jan. 1, 2025.

The top Democrat in the House is blaming Republicans for a government shutdown if one happens.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday evening in remarks from the U.S. Capitol that “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited on the American people that results from a government shutdown, or worse.”

“An agreement is an agreement,” Jeffries concluded. “It was bipartisan, and there’s nothing more to say.”

Democrats have decried the GOP revolt over the stopgap measure, which would have also provided some $100 billion in disaster aid to states hammered by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and other natural disasters.

Musk’s position with the incoming Trump administration isn’t technically part of a government department or agency, but he is continuing to use his massive megaphone on the social platform X to condemn the spending measure.

Into Wednesday evening, Musk reposted several messages from others criticizing the proposal to his more than 207 million followers.

Musk rejected the plan almost as soon as it was released late Tuesday night, posting, “This should not pass” in the wee hours of the following morning.

Musk, who along with Vivek Ramaswamy is heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency, has been leading the charge against the measure, warning, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”

It’s not an idle threat coming from the world’s richest man, who helped bankroll Trump’s victory and can easily use his America PAC to make or break political careers.

Donald Trump’s rejection of a spending bill that would prevent a holiday season government shutdown was a display of dominance from a president-elect still a month away from inauguration who remains hundreds of miles away at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It reinjected a sense of chaos and political brinkmanship that was reminiscent of his first term in office.

The episode also showcased the influence of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent the day attacking the budget legislation as full of excessive spending. They kicked up a storm on social media — Musk even threatened to support primary challenges against anyone who voted for the measure — before Trump decided to weigh in himself.

“Kill the Bill!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X as he gleefully reposted messages from Republican House members who vowed not to back the bill.

▶ Read more about Trump’s chaotic return to Washington

If Congress doesn’t approve a continuing resolution or more permanent spending measure by Friday, the federal government could shut down.

This is all happening in part because when the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Congress simply punted the problem by passing a temporary funding bill to keep the government in operation.

That measure expires on Friday.

When Congress is down to the wire on passing measures to fund the federal government, the term “CR” often comes up. What does it mean?

“CR” stands for “continuing resolution,” and it’s a temporary spending bill that lets the federal government stay open and operating before Congress and the president have approved a more permanent appropriation.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, CRs typically keep the same level of funding of appropriations from the prior year, or a previously approved CR from the current year.

The decision came as Republicans found themselves at an impasse over a package to fund the government before the Friday midnight deadline.

The term gets thrown around a lot during discussion of congressional spending measures. But what exactly is it?

The omnibus bill is a massive, all-encompassing measure that lawmakers generally had little time to digest — or understand — before voting on it.

There are a lot of spending measures all rolled into one, and sometimes that’s what happens if the dozen separate funding measures haven’t worked their way through the congressional spending process in time to be passed in order to fund the federal government.

Congressional Democrats were quick to condemn Trump’s rejection of the spending measure, saying failing to fund the federal government would cause hardship for many people but not wealthy Americans like the president-elect.

“Why do the billionaires — Musk, Ramaswamy, Trump — want to shut down the government for Christmas?” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in a post on the social platform X. “Because they still get paid.”

Murphy also said a shutdown would mean difficulties for “troops, TSA agents and other federal workers who won’t get paid,” adding: “It’s their kids who will suffer this Christmas.”

The massive 1,500-page bill was on the verge of collapse, as hard right conservatives rejected the increased spending, egged on by Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk who rejected the plan almost as soon as it was released late Tuesday night.

Rank-and-file lawmakers complained about the extra spending — which includes their first pay-raises in more than a decade — a shock after one of the most unproductive chaotic session in modern times. A number of Republicans were waiting for Trump to signal whether they should vote yes or no.

Even the addition of much-needed disaster aid, some $100.4 billion in the aftermath of hurricanes and other natural calamities that ravaged states this year, plus $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers failed to win over the budget-slashing GOP.

“This should not pass,” Musk posted on his social media site X in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

The outcome comes as no surprise for Johnson, who like other Republican House speakers before him, has been unable to convince his majority to go along with the routine needs of federal government operations, which they would prefer to slash.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has added his voice to Republicans opposing the spending bill, which he called “grotesque” and “an insult to Americans’ intelligence.”

In a post on the social platform X, DeSantis wrote that his former congressional colleagues were “hiding behind disaster relief funding.”

He noted that since 2022, his state has invested more than $3.5 billion in its own preparedness and disaster funds, while still weathering “several catastrophic hurricanes.”

President-elect Donald Trump abruptly rejected a bipartisan plan Wednesday to prevent a Christmastime government shutdown, instead telling House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans to essentially renegotiate — days before a deadline when federal funding runs out.

Trump’s sudden entrance into the debate and new demands sent Congress spiraling as lawmakers are trying to wrap up work and head home for the holidays. It leaves Johnson scrambling to engineer a new plan before Friday’s deadline to keep government open.

“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH,” Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance said in a statement.

The president-elect made an almost unrealistic proposal that combined the some continuation of government funds along with a much more controversial provision to raise the nation’s debt limit — something his own party routinely rejects. “Anything else is a betrayal of our country,” they wrote.

Democrats decried the GOP revolt over the stopgap measure, which would have also provided some $100 billion in disaster aid to states hammered by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and other natural disasters.