A government shutdown would be a bad start for President-elect Trump | Editorial

Trump with the tech billionaire Elon Musk

Blaming Democrats won’t fly this time. Republicans control the House, and it was Trump who torpedoed the initial agreement.

The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board/Palm Beach Post

The chaos of a federal government shutdown is not the Christmas present America wants. Unfortunately, that’s the gift America is likely to get, thanks to the ham-fisted interference of the president-elect and his band of oligarchs who objected to a bipartisan agreement in Congress that would have kept the government going well into the new year.

Republicans and Democrats had worked out another stop-gap spending bill, which included $100 billion in disaster relief aid, something that would benefit a state like Florida that has been hit with three hurricanes this year. That bill wasn’t good enough for Donald Trump or his billionaire ally Elon Musk, who forced Congress to vote on a nonsensical spending plan that includes cuts to several popular programs and a demand to lift the debt ceiling for two years.

Congress balked, in bipartisan fashion. The Trump package was rejected in the U.S. House of Representatives, with 38 Republican House members voting no. Blaming Democrats won’t fly this time. Republicans control the House, and it was Trump who torpedoed the initial agreement that still needs approval in the U.S. Senate and the signature of President Joe Biden to go into effect.

Trump and his supporters insist that it was the president-elect’s decision to urge Congress to consider an alternative to the bipartisan bill. But, Musk’s fingerprints are all over this controversy and that’s not helping Trump at the moment.If Donald Trump wanted to tarnish his new term as president before stepping foot in Washington, he couldn’t have found a better way to do it. The nation is now literally hours away from a government shutdown, the last one in 2018 which cost the American economy $3 billion, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, and it happened under Trump’s watch as president, spurred by his desire to build a wall along the U.S-Mexico border. Trump has the chance to avert a new shutdown, and its potential disruption by backing off and allowing Congress to pass its bipartisan spending plan.

A government shutdown would be a bad start for President-elect Trump | Editorial
Trump at the NYSE after being named the person of the year by the Times magazine.

Trump should know better. He had largely avoided the chaos many feared as president-elect — until now. Now, the very threat of a government shutdown that would cause military families to go without paychecks has him in a political bind.

Make no mistake: It willl damage his standing and more importantly, hurt the country. If the worst occurs, the onus will fall on Trump, his allies and Republicans in Congress who somehow believe that a shutdown won’t hurt them politically now that the 2024 election is over.

Trump can fix this mess of his own making, but time’s a ticking.

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