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Report Shows Musk and Trump Pushed GOP to Kill the Bill to Keep Government Open

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President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have succeeded in getting House Republicans to kill what was expected to be an easily-passed continuing resolution that would keep the federal government open and avert a costly and confusing shutdown just days before Christmas.

Early Wednesday evening, Republicans rejected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s bill, according to The Washington Post.

“The chances of a shutdown have now increased quite a bit,” CNN’s Manu Raju had reported at 4:35 PM ET, amid the fast-moving developments. “Congress hasn’t even discussed a debt ceiling hike. And Trump is inserting that toxic fight on top of the government funding bill that is already at risk of collapsing amid a revolt on the right.”

“And just like that,” observed NBC News’ Garret Haake, “we’re teetering on the edge of a government shutdown, as Trump & Vance come out against Speaker Johnson’s CR.”

“Suddenly Trump and Vance now say they want to negotiate on the debt ceiling, as the CR+ deal goes absolutely sideways in less than 24 hours,” noted longtime congressional correspondent Jamie Dupree.

READ MORE: Trump Orders Senate GOP to Not ‘Fast-Track’ Confirmations — Will Some Nominees Change?

“Trump-Vance statement trashes the bipartisan stopgap funding bill and now calls for adding a DEBT CEILING INCREASE, which is nowhere in the mix. Two days till government shuts down,” noted NBC News’ Sahil Kapur.

Trump and his Vice President-elect, JD Vance, had issued a statement after Musk’s many hours of attacking the continuing resolution, which The Post attributes to killing the CR.

“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” the statement read.

Democrats are not calling for the federal government to shut down.

“It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief,” it also states, which is false. “THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL PRESIDENT. WE WILL IN 32 DAYS!”

Wednesday morning, PBS News had reported: “Congressional leaders have unveiled a stopgap spending bill that will keep the federal government funded through March 14 and provide more than $100 billion in emergency aid to help states and local communities recover from Hurricanes Helene and Milton and other natural disasters.”

“President Joe Biden has sought about $114 billion in disaster aid, submitting a $99 billion request in November, telling lawmakers the funding was ‘urgently needed.’ The administration subsequently updated its request to include funding to repair federal facilities damaged due to natural disasters.”

“The bill will provide $100.4 billion in disaster relief, with an additional $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers struggling with low commodity prices and high input costs.”

Musk, Donald Trump’s incoming co-chair of the non-federal government Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on Wednesday had been calling for Congress to stop passage of all legislation until the President-elect is sworn in to office on January 20. For more than 12 hours it appeared Musk was actively undermining the CR that was meant to avert a shutdown at 12:01 AM Saturday.

READ MORE: Why Aren’t More Democrats Speaking Out Against RFK Jr.’s HHS Nomination?

No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk, late Wednesday afternoon, posted to his social media platform X.

“Kill the Bill,” Musk declared to his more than 207 million followers, referring to the continuing resolution. The CR must be passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Biden before the midnight Friday deadline to avert a costly and disruptive government shutdown right before Christmas.

Musk’s remark was in response to a post from far-right Congressman Jim Banks, who is now the Republican Senator-elect for Indiana.

Banks had claimed the CR “funds the censorship of conservative speech for the entire first year of the Trump administration. Unacceptable!”

“‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” Musk also claimed.

CBS News’s Jim LaPorta, a former Marine who has written extensively on the military and veterans, responded to Musk’s claim by saying, “The impact to military families, particularly at the lowest ranks where there’s food insecurity and families living paycheck to paycheck are impacted. Child care centers which some service members depend on can shut down during a shutdown—a critical function for them.”

In response to a post falsely claiming the bill also includes a 40% pay raise for members of Congress, Musk wrote: “Unconscionable.”

Musk also wrote, and pinned to the top of his feed, this: “How can this be called a ‘continuing resolution’ if it includes a 40% pay increase for Congress?”

The pay raise, the first for Congress since 2009, would increase salaries by about 4%, not 40%.

“Rank-and-file lawmakers in both chambers earn $174,000 annual salary, with those in leadership earning more. The maximum potential member pay adjustment in January 2025 under the stopgap spending bill would be 3.8 percent, which would result in a salary of $180,600, an increase of $6,600,” Politico reported.

Musk had kicked off the day attacking the continuing resolution.

“At 4:15 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, Musk tweeted that ‘This bill should not pass,’ and he’s gotten noticeably more strident as the day has gone along,” Mediaite reported Wednesday afternoon. “In a raging tweetstorm over the last hour or so, Musk has called the bill a ‘scam,’ a ‘criminal bill,’ an ‘insane crime against the American people,’ ‘an outrage,’ ‘terrible,’ and ‘madness.'”

“’The more I learn, the more obvious it becomes that this spending bill is a crime. It even includes funding for the worst illegal censorship operation in the entire government (GEC)!!’ mused Musk in one post.”

At 3:58 PM Musk claimed the continuing resolution was “dead.”

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned if the government shuts down, Republicans will own it: “House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government. And hurt the working class Americans they claim to support. You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.”

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) also issued a warning: “Remember what this is all about: Trump wants Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem. Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas.”

Meanwhile, Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff for Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, offered this observation: “Trump and Vance intervening to personally block states from getting disaster relief – including red states hit by Helene – after weeks of flat out lying to the country about the emergency response is one of the most cynical and depraved things I’ve ever seen in this town.”

RELATED: Gaetz Rages at Secret Vote to Release Ethics Report, Insists He Was ‘Fully Exonerated’

 

Image via Reuters

 

 

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Trump White House Turns on ‘Moron’ MAGA Loyalist ‘Begging for an Additional Brain Cell’

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The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

 

 

 

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Veteran Journalist War-Games Trump’s ‘Rolling Coup’ — and How It Fails

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Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘Be Very Afraid’: Carville Warns Trump ‘Everybody Is Out for You’

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Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.

Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”

“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”

“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”

“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”

“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”

“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.

“Be scared. Be very afraid.”

It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”

Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”

Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”

Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”

Image via Reuters

 

 

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