Trump Lobs Grenade Into Spending Talks, Causing Chaos In Congress

"It is a taste of things to come. The House is going to be ungovernable,” one senator said of this week's disarray over government funding.

WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump is back, baby.

The president-elect, who often blew up painstaking congressional negotiations with last-minute demands during his first presidency, on Wednesday torpedoed a bipartisan budget deal that would have kept the government open past Friday ― and he’s not even been sworn in to his second White House term yet.

In a statement posted online that took just about everyone in Washington by surprise, including members of his own party, Trump criticized a spending bill negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and called for an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit ― a controversial idea that Republicans typically use to demand concessions from Democrats, not the other way around.

He then threatened to primary “any Republican” who votes for a stopgap government funding bill unless it contains a debt limit extension, ratcheting up pressure on Johnson and other Republican members of Congress as they struggle to come up with an alternative plan to fund the government.

The debt ceiling demand took lawmakers of both parties by surprise and instantly made the funding standoff more complicated. There had been no discussion in recent weeks about the debt ceiling, which typically consumes months of negotiations and likely didn’t need to be addressed until mid-2025.