Tom Minear: Why Donald Trump’s Republican colleagues are his new enemy
The limits of Donald Trump’s landslide have been laid bare in the battle to avoid a government shutdown. Tom Minear says the new president will have to get used to fighting Republicans.
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Fight, fight, fight. That was Donald Trump’s defiant response to being shot, and it became the rallying cry that powered him to victory last month. It worked because he had an enemy – well, two enemies, given he overcame both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The events of recent days suggest the incoming president’s biggest political problem may now be that the only people left for him to fight are his fellow Republicans.
Saturday was the deadline for Congress to fund the US government and avoid a chaotic shutdown that would halt pay cheques to public servants over the holidays. Any deal needed the approval of the House, which is controlled by Republicans, the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, and Mr Biden, who had disappeared from Washington DC.
So Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson followed the usual script: he horse-traded for a stopgap budget agreement laden with other priorities both parties had failed to deal with. This is not how government should be run. But the eve of a shutdown is not the time to fix it.
Nevertheless, Mr Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk blew up the 1547-page bill with a social media barrage, barracking for a shutdown while blithely ignoring the optics of leaving America’s troops unpaid as he counted the extra $US170bn he had made since the election.
Some Republicans followed his lead and turned on Mr Johnson, who scaled back the bill but added a suspension of the debt limit, meeting a fresh demand from Mr Trump to give himself time to implement his own expensive initiatives. Others, however, refused to remove the handbrake on borrowing, and about one in five Republican House members voted against it.
Vice President-elect JD Vance blamed Democrats for the bill’s defeat, as though he was not aware his party controlled the House. Democrats joked about “President Elon Musk”, as though they had forgotten their man still had the keys to the Oval Office.
As for Mr Trump, he was left to ponder the limits of his so-called landslide. While his party will narrowly control both chambers of Congress next year, this will count for nothing unless Republicans stick together. They have been unable to do this for the past two years; indeed, Mr Johnson is only their leader because his predecessor was ousted in an unprecedented coup.
This is Mr Trump’s new fight. What happened last week suggests he won’t always win.
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Originally published as Tom Minear: Why Donald Trump’s Republican colleagues are his new enemy