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TRUMP CHAOS RETURNS TO WASHINGTON AS “PRESIDENT MUSK” TALK RAGES

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It has often been said that during Donald Trump’s first term as President chaos reigned supreme. Now less than two months after he defeated President Joe Biden, Trump-related chaos has returned to Washington — and he hasn’t been sworn in yet.

Meanwhile, billionaire and major Trump donor Elon Musk has been high profile, tweeting more than 100 tweets a day on some days, by Trump’s side at Mar-a-Largo, being with Trump while he talks with foreign and other officials so much that a “President Musk” theme has been pitchforked into the headlines. There are now rumblings from the Trump camp to journalists that Musk takes orders from him, not the other way around. Which has spurred on more tweets, AI created photos of Trump as Musk’s servant, dog, first lady and a redone movie poster of Brokeback Mountain featuring you-know-who and you-know-who kissing.

The new era of chaos was confirmed in the recent Republican fiasco over refunding the government. Musk tweeted up a storm calling for GOPers to kill a bipartisan bill, then Trump basically said “me, too” (although his camp insisted he called for scrapping it first) and Republicans axed the bipartisan bill. In the end although a bipartisan bill did pass, Trump’s demand that it contain elimination of the debt limit was ignored and it sparked a flood of headlines about Musk/Trump initiated chaos.

The AP:

“After days of threats and demands, Donald Trump had little to show for it once lawmakers passed a budget deal in the early hours of Saturday, narrowly averting a pre-Christmas government shutdown,” the AP reports.

“The president-elect successfully pushed House Republicans to jettison some spending, but he failed to achieve his central goal of raising the debt limit. It demonstrated that despite his decisive election victory and frequent promises of retribution, many members of his party are still willing to openly defy him.”

“Trump’s decision to inject himself into the budget debate a month before his inauguration also showed that he remains more adept at blowing up deals than making them, and it foreshadowed that his second term will likely be marked by the same infighting, chaos and brinksmanship that characterized his first.”

Republicans in Congress fear they may not be able to enact Trump’s agenda, the Hill reports:

Republican lawmakers say Congress’s near brush with a government shutdown shows that House Republicans do not have a functional majority, giving them a bad feeling about how difficult it will be to pass President-elect Trump’s agenda in 2025.

While Republicans in both chambers broadly agree on the need to secure the border and extend Trump’s expiring tax cuts, GOP senators fear that passing legislation to accomplish those goals, as well as raising the debt limit and cutting federal spending, will be enormously difficult next year.

Republican senators say the turmoil within the House GOP conference this past week shows the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will face an enormous challenge in passing two budget reconciliation packages and debt-limit legislation in 2025.

“It’s going to be really hard in the House because they just simply don’t have a working majority,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

The GOP is hoping to move two packages on border security and domestic energy production, and taxes through special budgetary rules that sidestep a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

The problem, GOP senators worry, may be the House, where Republicans will only have a majority of one, two or three seats, depending on vacancies. At least two House lawmakers are headed to the Trump administration, while former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is not expected to take his seat in the next Congress.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) warned that “reconciliation is not easy, referring to the special budgetary process that can be used to circumvent a Senate filibuster.

But predictions are made even harder due to the increasing role and high profile of the unelected Elon Musk:

As Elon Musk unleashed a volley of X posts demanding that Republicans back away from a deal to avert a government shutdown, Donald Trump was publicly silent.

Instead, the president-elect holed up in his office Wednesday in a ballroom above Mar-a-Lago. While Musk riled up the MAGA masses, Trump was holding a series of conversations with top aides — including Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller — as Vice President-elect JD Vance privately expressed Trump’s concerns about the bill on Capitol Hill, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely.

By the time Trump and Vance finally chimed in several hours later in a joint statement, the measure was already tanked and Speaker Mike Johnson’s future was in jeopardy.

The sequence highlighted the evolving dynamic with his high-profile benefactor-turned-adviser and raised an awkward question for Trump of whether he or Musk was running the show. As GOP lawmakers on Thursday floated the prospect of installing the billionaire businessman as House speaker, and Democrats taunted Trump by claiming Musk was the real leader of the Republican Party, Trump did a round of interviews with reporters seemingly meant to ensure they knew it was his idea to kill the bipartisan funding bill.

[…]Trump aides and allies insisted that Musk was acting at the president-elect’s direction.

Musk is a “pawn in Trump’s chessboard, like everybody else,” said a person close to Trump who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. The media “really wants to paint Elon as this independent character. If it were a chessboard, [Musk would] be a bishop.”

But the fact that Trump’s spokesperson felt it necessary to issue a statement about who was leading the GOP showed the extent to which lines had been blurred, even among some Republicans and close Trump allies.