That’s not going to happen, I’m afraid. The new congress is sworn in on Friday. But then, he has so little experience in government that he wouldn’t know that. Well, other than being president for four years and staging a coup in January four years ago.
He’s just having a tantrum because he knows that he’s going to be faced with a terrible problem, right off the bat.
The fiscal hawks are gunning for the budget and he’s empowered them by giving Musk and Ramaswamy this silly commission charged with slashing spending which they’re using to rally the troops. It was a huge mistake. (He should have given him the mandate to go to Mars or something,)
GOP leaders are staring down two bad options to solve President-elect Donald Trump’s debt-limit problem, after failing to execute his demand to lift the federal borrowing cap in the last government funding bill.
One path requires full buy-in from Republican lawmakers to address the issue via budget reconciliation — a huge challenge thanks to the party’s fierce fiscal hawks. The other entails winning over Democrats, who for the most part rejected Trump’s initial debt-limit gambit last week.
“Whoever advised the president that it was even possible needs to better understand how this place works,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said about Trump’s latest push to raise the debt limit.
It’s going to be an urgent issue for Trump as soon as he takes office. The federal government will resume the cap on its borrowing authority on Jan. 1, as the U.S. sits on a national debt of more than $36 trillion, though the Treasury Department can buy time for a number of months with so-called extraordinary measures. The fiscal time bomb illustrates the struggle Trump and Republican leaders face heading into 2025, as they consider whether to court Democrats who will want concessions or their own conservatives who are known for rigidly sticking to their demands to cut funding.
“I’ve told my caucus, if they try to do it under reconciliation, they’ll lose my vote,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on Friday. “I told them: You want to kill reconciliation, put something on that we don’t like.”
They are intent upon extending their massive tax cuts and expanding them, adding more trillions to the debt. They also want much more money for drill, baby, drill, the border and the military. So they’ll have to cut over $2.5 trillion in cuts to social security, Medicaid and Medicare to cover that. Trump isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but he does realize that he can’t control the hardliners on this and feels desperate already over what a shitshow that’s going to be.
Today he endorsed Mike Johnson (in the most hilariously self-serving way possible) but there’s good reason to believe that the hardliners really don’t care what he says about any of this.
Could he have buried it any deeper? Lol.
He knows they are looking at a disaster. If the Democrats hold fast, and they certainly will if the Republicans dig in on these massive cuts, it’s going to be quite a spring. And who knows if the MAGA Freedom Caucus will even vote for Johnson on January 3rd. Right now there is at least one who won’t and several more who say they haven’t decided. As Trump would say, “it will be wild!”