Trump begins his lame duck term pre-hobbled
Thank you, Elon Musk.
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Just before Christmas, Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk were so eager for Trump to start acting like an ineffective lame duck president that they blundered into a debacle over a temporary spending bill, thereby positioning Democrats to exploit GOP plans to cut essential government programs.
The failed Trump and Musk show of “power” had no material impact on government spending and “succeeded” only in cutting funding for pediatric cancer research and nixing efforts to cut back on junk fees. (The cancer research spending was later revived by the Senate.) But the fiasco revealed the mendaciousness of Republicans’ supposed goal of increasing government “efficiency,” while confirming Trump/Musk’s actual plan to remake the federal government — not to make it spend less, but to make it provide less to those with less, and more to those with a lot.
The show of non-force began on the morning of December 18 with Musk, clearly unilaterally, unleashing a wave of uninformed tweets attacking a continuing budget resolution bill that it was wholly in Trump’s interest to pass without much fanfare.
The bill’s primary purpose was to continue government funding at current levels until March, when the GOP will have majorities in both houses of Congress and Trump will be in the White House (or on the golf course, as the case may be). But for calendar-related reasons, the spending bill also had to include aid both for large farmers (a key GOP constituency) and disaster assistance. And so Democrats and Republicans also negotiated the inclusion of some fiscally insignificant additional items, such as funding for childhood cancer research.
Musk had apparently glanced at some entirely predictable far right social media sniping about the bill, which he was inclined to repeat and amplify, particularly the false and misleading parts. He had self-interested reasons for making a stink. His business interests are tightly aligned with the Communist Party of China, given Tesla’s massive investments in that country, so he had cause to object to provisions intended to limit the transfer of technology to China.
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Accordingly, Musk began openly threatening House and Senate Republicans with being primaried if they dared cast a vote that was manifestly in Trump’s political interest. In a matter of hours, Musk succeeded in making the bill politically radioactive for many GOP officeholders who cower in constant fear, not of casting votes that harm their constituents, but rather of facing well-funded Republican opponents.
A rational political actor in Trump’s position would have called Musk to berate him for such an idiotic move, then rapidly moved to salvage the bill. Instead, Trump had the bright idea of announcing that he entirely endorsed Musk’s tweets. He also threatened House Republicans that he would join Musk in primarying them unless they rewrote the bill to get rid of the statutory “debt ceiling.”
Anyone who pays even modest attention to GOP budget hostage-taking recognized how strange the new Trump demand was. The purported debt ceiling remains in place for the sole purpose of allowing Republicans to periodically threaten to cause the US Treasury to default on the nation’s debt obligations, and thereby destroy the economy. They do this in order to grandstand about “fiscal discipline,” albeit only when a Democrat is in the White House.
While enough GOP legislators are all but certain to vote to raise or suspend the debt ceiling with as little fuss as possible when it is about to be reached in a matter of months, they did not want to endorse Trump’s — accurate — description of the debt ceiling as a pointless sham, particularly while they were jumping up and down about their party’s supposed devotion to austerity. Trump’s demand, therefore, went nowhere fast, and his threats were quickly revealed to be empty.
It was nonetheless revealing that Trump was so eager obtain the elimination of the debt ceiling, or at least its suspension for just so long as he will be the president, that he unleashed empty threats against members of Congress he will need to effectively pressure to make other votes soon after the New Year.
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Giving away the game
Since Trump won the election, he and Musk — well, mostly Musk — have been loudly claiming that the Trump administration will be singularly devoted to cutting government spending.
For weeks, it seemed that every other Fox News segment was devoted to touting how many “trillions” Trump and his DOGE crew were going to be cutting with the enthusiastic support of Republican leaders in both houses of Congress. Just how and what they were planning to cut, however, remained strangely unstated.
Yet in his first pseudo presidential budget-related act, Trump did not come out publicly in favor of any remotely material spending cuts. Instead, he expressed far more concern that the massive increases in the national debt he will inevitably incur in the near future face as few headwinds as possible.
As for Musk — Trump’s purported austerity tsar — he also managed to leave no doubt that DOGE, like Tesla’s long promised fully self-driving cars, is composed far more of hype than substance. Musk declared “victory” because the bill Congress ultimately passed had fewer pages than the initial draft, never mind that the final bill had virtually the same material impact on the nation’s budget deficit and its debt as the version he had threatened to remove Republicans from Congress over.
The message was clear to anyone paying attention: DOGE is a sham.
The events of earlier this month demonstrate that the Trump/Musk administration has every intention of ballooning the budget deficit, just as Trump did from the outset of his first term, well before the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. But Trump’s cronies in Congress also confirmed that they do want to take a chainsaw to certain parts of federal spending — the parts that provide essential support to seniors, veterans, the disabled, and the poor.
Over the past several weeks, Republican leaders in and out of Congress have been openly salivating at the prospect that the Trump/Musk DOGE project can serve as a mechanism for achieving the holy grail of rightwing economic policy since the Goldwater era: gutting Social Security, Medicare, and maybe even veterans benefits and Medicaid along with them.
And sure enough, there have been multiple reports that Speaker Johnson reached a “handshake deal” to pair the next increase in the debt ceiling with a $2.5 trillion cut in “mandatory” spending,” which Politico reports will target “Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP nutrition assistance, Medicare and welfare payments to the poorest Americans.” Furthermore, according to Politico, the GOP plans to gut these essential programs — which many Trump voters rely upon for their day-to-day subsistence and healthcare — by end-running the Senate filibuster rules and relying solely on GOP votes in both chambers.
Trump has made no secret of his intention not only to renew the wildly regressive and deficit-ballooning tax cuts from his first term that are about to expire, but also to enact a grab bag of additional tax cuts for the very richest Americans. Indeed, Trump held a virtual auction for such billionaire goodies during the campaign as he was soliciting help from Musk and company.
To make their intentions all the more clear, 20 Republican senators — including the incoming majority leader, John Thune — voted against what should have been an entirely uncontroversial measure to get rid of longstanding unfairnesses in the Social Security system, contending that the United States can’t afford to help retired persons in need as it prepares to enact a new round of regressive tax cuts.
After the fiasco surrounding the spending bill, there’s no doubt that the Republican program for the upcoming months, during the potentially short window during which the GOP retains a shaky majority in the House, is to make America more unequal again. And the infighting that’s erupted among MAGA cronies in the days since the CR debacle demonstrates loyalists’ uncertainty about whether voters will support the actual Trump agenda.
We’ve come a long way in a very short time from DOGE being “all the rage,” as one reliable Trump shill recently put it.
“It’s happening before our very eyes”
Democrats also provided a preview of how they intend to play the hand of political cards Trump and Musk have been stupid enough to hand to them.
As Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stated, the CR battle Trump and Musk chose to fight represented the first round in a battle to save programs that are not only essential for millions of Americans, but also highly popular. During the Trump/Musk era, the “populist” GOP is choosing to place itself on the side of those who want to rebalance the federal budget not to make it more fiscally sound, but rather more unfair.
As Jeffries said:
It has become increasingly apparent that many of my House Republican colleagues want to jam big tax cuts for the wealthy, the well-off and the well-connected down the throats of the American people and try to pay for those tax cuts, which will not benefit everyday Americans, by cutting Social Security and Medicare. This is not a hypothetical. It’s not hype. It’s not hyperbole. It’s happening before our very eyes.
Some critics have been, justifiably, critical of the state of messaging by Democrats during and since the November election, and have questioned whether the party has a cogent plan to both effectively oppose Trump and win upcoming races.
The jury is still out on that important question. But one thing is clear: Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have already handed Democrats some massive political opportunities, even as their plans pose ominous threats to the nation and its citizens.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year! Cheers.
I just turned 65. On November 6th, the Republicans and other feckless idiots who voted for the stain, (or who didn’t vote at all,) set me on a course to have to work 2-5 years longer than I’d planned should my ENTITLEMENTS be reduced or gutted. Raising the retirement age to 70 (from 67.5) is the most egregiously depressing cut of all.
I live in a CCRC (continuing care retirement center) and am, for now, fortunate enough to be able to afford this life-saving facility for both myself and my husband who has dementia. I see around me others who are just scraping by in order to live out the last years of their lives with dignity and some sense of peace and happiness. I see the care-givers here who are forced to work long hours and have the patience that is inconceivable to most outside of the community; yet their salaries come nowhere near the largess raked in by Musk and greedy trump. Some forego medical help, others have had a very meager holiday. Yet, those are the ones that trump/Musk want to take away from in order to pad their overly padded bank accounts and prestige positions. And in all of this, dare I ask where is trump's VP? A man who rose from poverty yet nowhere does he have anything to say?