[President-elect Donald Trump has long supported House Speaker Mike Johnson, hosting him on election night, bringing him to the Army-Navy college football game last weekend and backing him privately despite conservative complaints about the House’s actions. However, Trump’s go-ahead was given to Elon Musk, who helped tank Johnson’s short-term government funding deal by unleashing a barrage of social media posts starting early in the morning, calling the deal “criminal.” Trump followed up with threats to oppose any Republican who voted for it in a 2026 primary. He also injected another complication, calling for the debt ceiling to be lifted or eliminated entirely before he takes office.
The broadsides from Mar-a-Lago left Republican lawmakers wondering why it took until the final moment for the dramatic schism between Trump and Johnson to burst into view, and for the deal to fall apart. “It’s all very strange,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN. “This was completely avoidable.”
By Thursday evening, Trump was backing Johnson again as he tried to advance a different plan that sought to appease the GOP standard bearer’s demands. The 24-hour whiplash both underscored Johnson’s weakness and Musk’s opening with Trump. The bill, which would have extended government funding for three months, lifted the debt ceiling until 2027, extended the farm bill and included $110 billion for disaster relief, failed, with 38 Republicans voting against it.
The chaotic series of events has left House leadership scrambling, and the episode has raised questions about how Republicans on Capitol Hill, with a narrow majority and competing factions, will function once Trump takes office. And now Democrats, who helped Johnson save his job last spring, say they are through helping the Louisiana Republican manage his unruly conference.
Johnson was already close to an agreement with congressional leaders on a short-term measure to fund the government when he sat in a private box with the president-elect at the Army-Navy game last weekend. Trump told Johnson that he wanted a full-year spending bill – not a short-term resolution – and that he wanted the debt limit to be a part of that deal. “He wanted the decks cleared,” one source with knowledge of the conversation told CNN, alluding to Trump’s desire to begin his term with the more contentious spending fights in the rearview mirror so Congress could focus on enacting his agenda.
Trump’s allies in Mar-a-Lago had reached out to the speaker and his team in recent weeks, telegraphing the president-elect’s desire to deal with the debt limit before taking office. But his position wasn’t widely known. The conventional wisdom, according to several Trump allies, advisers and GOP officials, had been that they’d grapple with the debt ceiling as part of forthcoming talks on a spending bill in March, or a party-line package to implement Trump’s immigration and energy priorities.
Trump’s ultimate goal is to start the new Congress and his second term with a clean slate – and without the potential for Democrats to retain a bargaining chip that could dilute their agenda. Emboldened by even a razor-thin majority in both chambers, Trump believes Republicans will be in a more powerful position to demand steeper spending cuts during negotiations next year. “Mar-a-Lago has signaled a lot of questioning about letting a debt limit slide into next year,” a source involved in the conversations told CNN, referring to the Palm Beach members’ club where Trump and his advisers have been crafting policy positions behind closed doors. “Why are we letting something that will be a Dem leverage point remain in place for the next year?”
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