Trump and Musk put DC in tailspin with spending bill attacks as shutdown nears: Live

Donald Trump is adamant about his position on the future of the debt ceiling and how the continuing resolution spending deal will be resolved. In his latest interview today — one of several so far — he spoke with Robert Costa at CBS News, here’s what he tweeted shortly after:

President-elect Trump is unwavering in his position on the fiscal and spending standoff on Capitol Hill.

In a phone conversation, he told me, “Number one, the debt ceiling should be thrown out entirely. Number two, a lot of the different things they thought they’d receive [in the recently proposed spending deal] are now going to be thrown out, 100 percent. And we’ll see what happens. We’ll see if we have a closure during the Biden administration. But if it’s going to take place, it’s going to take place during Biden, not during Trump.”

Trump has long been criticial of the debt limit. And several of his allies tell me that he has been urging Republicans to deal with this matter before he takes office next year so that he could focus on key agenda items rather than being mired in debt-ceiling discussions next spring/summer.

President-elect Donald Trump isn’t joining calls from some in his party to replace House Speaker Mike Johnson at the start of the next Congress after the Louisiana Republican tanked a bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown, apparently on orders from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Johnson won the gavel last October after a protracted fight following the ouster of former speaker Kevin McCarthy — an event touched off by McCarthy’s decision to allow a vote to fund the government on a bipartisan basis rather than forcing a shutdown until passage of a party-line bill more acceptable to hardline conservatives.

Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington, D.C.

Despite last night having personally intervened to undermine the negotiated continuing resolution to keep the government open, Donald Trump appears to believe that if nothing is agreed by midnight on Friday and the government does shut down, people will blame Joe Biden…

ABC’s Jonathan Karl is the latest journalist to speak with the president-elect today. Here’s what he posted on X, just now:

In a conversation a few minutes ago, @realDonaldTrump told me, “There won’t be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with.”

He wants the debt ceiling eliminated or extended.

“If we don’t get it, then we’re going to have a shutdown, but it’ll be a Biden shutdown, because shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president.”

Given the narrative pushed by both Democrats and Republicans that Elon Musk and Trump are the force behind the scrapping of the CR bill, it seems unlikely that any subsequent shutdown would be blamed on anyone but them.

However, these are strange times.

Here’s Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries just now:

Johnson’s stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) would have bankrolled the government at current funding levels through to mid-March 2025, but the president-elect and his deputy’s intervention now appears to have tanked its chances of passing in its present form before Friday’s deadline, sparking chaos on Capitol Hill.

Joe Sommerlad has the details.

California Democratic Rep Brad Sherman says: “I don’t know who is going to win this shutdown, but I know who loses and that’s the American people.”

He adds: “We know who caused it. We had a deal. We negotiated a deal. And then Musk decided to change the deal. Do I call him President Musk?”