Shortly after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his Democratic counterparts announced a bipartisan deal to prevent a government shutdown at midnight on Saturday, the MAGA movement tore it apart and sent the federal government hurtling towards a holiday shutdown.
Although many far-right Republicans grumbled from the get-go, Johnson’s problem really began when billionaire Elon Musk launched into a thread on the social media app formerly known as Twitter excoriating the details of the bill. Although there were many provisions of questionable merit attached to the continuing resolution that would keep the government operating until next March, Musk’s thread was full of misinformation and falsehoods — a problem that has always plagued the platform and become even worse since he took ownership of it in 2022.
President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance then issued a joint statement announcing their opposition to the legislation, effectively killing any chance it had of passing the Republican-controlled House with less than 48 hours to prevent a government shutdown. It’s worth remembering that the last time Republicans had unified control of the House, Senate, and Presidency, the federal government shut down three times in just one year — more than any other year in the preceding four decades. If Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk are so quick to undermine legislation negotiated by their own party’s House speaker, who has a far narrower majority to work with than his predecessor did in 2018, the country is likely to be in for uniquely high levels of government dysfunction over the next two years.
