Trump threatens government shutdown unless debt limit demand met, blames Biden if it happens
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(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday took credit for killing the House Republican-proposed government funding bill, telling ABC News there will be a government shutdown unless Congress eliminates or extends the limit on government borrowing.
“We’re not going to fall into the debt ceiling quicksand,” Trump said in an exclusive phone interview. “There won’t be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with.”
Trump said he is concerned that if government borrowing reaches the limit set by the debt ceiling, it could lead to an economic depression. Under current law, the federal government would hit its borrowing limit sometime in the spring of 2025, during the first months of the second Trump presidency. Trump said he wants it taken care of now, while Joe Biden is president.
“By doing what I’m doing, I put it into the Biden administration,” Trump said. “In this administration, not in my administration.”
“The interesting thing is, [the debt ceiling] possibly means nothing, or it means [the] depression of 1929,” Trump added. “Nobody really knows. It means nothing, but psychologically it may mean a lot, right? In other words, it doesn’t have a real meaning other than you’ve violated something. And that may be just, one day, half a story, or it may lead to the depression of 1929 and nobody wants to take the chance, except the Democrats.”
Congress must pass a funding bill by Friday night to avoid a shutdown of major federal services.
Trump said he is more concerned about the debt ceiling, which was not part of the spending bill rejected by the House on Wednesday after Trump and ally Elon Musk weighed in, than he is in the level of government spending.
“I don’t mind the spending for the farmers and for disaster relief from North Carolina, etc., but that’s all,” he said, referring to $100 billion in disaster relief aid and $10 billion in assistance to farmers.
When asked about concerns about a potential shutdown, the president-elect reiterated there will be a shutdown if the debt ceiling isn’t addressed, and claimed it would be Biden’s fault.
“Shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president,” Trump said. “That’s what I tried to teach [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, but I obviously didn’t do a very good job [with] a shutdown because he kept giving them extensions into my territory, a shutdown only hurts or inures to the person who happens to be president.”
As for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s fate, Trump said, “If he’s strong, he’ll survive it. If he’s strong, he will survive it.”
(WASHINGTON) — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head to Capitol Hill next week to meet with House Republicans on their plan to slash regulations and other parts of the federal government.
Speaker Mike Johnson announced he will host them on Thursday, Dec. 5 to discuss “major reform ideas” to “revive the principle of limited government.”
Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” Their roles have been described as “outside of government” advisers on how to make drastic cuts to various federal agencies and their workforces.
Musk, in particular, has become a member of Trump’s inner circle as the president-elect prepares for a second term. The Tesla billionaire spent Thanksgiving with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Earlier this week, Musk proposed abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” he wrote on his social media platform, X.
Trump on the campaign trail vowed to dismantle federal bureaucracy but did not specifically call for the CFPB to be eliminated. To gut an entire agency would be a difficult task, and would require legislation from Congress.
CFPB, which was formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers and review practices of the nation’s banks, lenders and other institutions, has long been a target of conservative attacks over its cost and its regulations.
Earlier this year, the CFPB survived a legal challenge led by former Trump administration Solicitor General Noel Francisco on behalf of a group of payday lenders alleging the agency’s structure was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, upheld the agency’s funding mechanism as constitutional.
Musk also recently reposted on social media the names of specific people and jobs that he suggested be cut. They include employees at the Department of Energy and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. “So many fake jobs,” Musk wrote in one post.
Musk and Ramaswamy outlined more of their plans for DOGE in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published last week.
They said they were helping Trump’s transition team bring on board a “lean team of small-government crusaders” that would be aimed at three core actions: repealing regulations, reducing the administrative workforce and saving costs.
“We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail,” they wrote. “Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026 — the expiration date we have set for our project.”
Legal and logistical hurdles remain for Musk and Ramaswamy’s goal to slash the government. But they will get some help on Capitol Hill by a new congressional subcommittee aimed at eliminating government waste in conjunction with DOGE. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative firebrand and staunch supporter of Trump, has been chosen to chair the panel.
Ramaswamy, in response to Johnson’s announcement of next week’s meeting, said he’s had “great discussions so far” with House and Senate GOP leaders about DOGE.
“Congress appears serious about delivering structural reform. We look forward to productive meetings in D.C. next week,” Ramaswamy wrote on X.
(GEORGIA) — With early voting underway in the key battleground state of Georgia, a top election official in the state forcefully pushed back Wednesday on false claims of voting machine fraud — a debunked conspiracy theory that proliferated after the 2020 presidential election and has now been revived by some prominent Republican figures.
“[There is] zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official on the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”
Sterling, in his comments, called out “certain congresspeople” — appearing to reference Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently pushed an unsubstantiated allegation that a Georgia resident’s early vote had been switched by a voting machine.
Greene, in an interview and social media post, shared an unidentified Whitfield County voter’s claim that a voting machine had printed their ballot with a different selection than the one they had made on the machine — a claim that local officials said was simply a case of human error.
“Humans make mistakes. They’re called mistakes for a reason,” Sterling wrote in a post on X. “This issue is human/user error, always will be. Whitfield Co. handled it & voter voted.”
In her tweet about the alleged incident, Greene told her followers to “please double check your printed ballot” before turning it in, and noted that “we vote on Dominion voting machines” — a reference to the voting machine company that was the target of numerous false conspiracy theories in 2020.
Greene pushed the same claims in an interview last week with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, according to a clip posted online, claiming the machine “kept on switching the votes” of that voter.
“It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020,” Greene said of the incident, which occurred in her district, again noting Georgia’s use of Dominion machines.
X owner Elon Musk — who, like Greene, is a supporter of former President Donald Trump — made similar conspiracy theory claims while speaking at a town hall in Pennsylvania last week.
Dominion, in the wake of the 2020 election, filed a series of defamation lawsuits after it became the center of a false conspiracy theory that voting machines had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden. Last year the company settled its landmark defamation suit against Fox News for a $787 million. The other suits are still ongoing.
In a statement, Dominion pushed back on Greene’s new claim.
“The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked,” a Dominion spokesperson said. “As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue in Whitfield County was due to voter error. The county provided the voter with an opportunity to mark and print a new ballot with their correct choices and the issue was quickly resolved.”
In a press release, the Whitfield County Board of Elections said there was no issue with the voting machine, and that this was “the only incident among over 6,000 ballots cast.”
“If we had reason to suspect that the machine was in error, we would have immediately taken the machine out of service,” the statement said. “No machines have been taken out of service.”
The statement noted that Georgia law allows voters to void their printed ballot “if they make the wrong selection on the ballot marking device.”
Greene, responding to a separate Facebook post by the election board, thanked the poll workers for “resolving the issues” and defended their work, writing that it is “not their fault.”
“They don’t make the Georgia state election laws and they are just doing their jobs,” Greene said of the poll workers.
Speaking at the press conference on Wednesday, Sterling said the “main situation” they have encountered includes “elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it.”
“Anyone claiming machines are flipping votes are lying or don’t research,” Sterling wrote in a post on X last week.
(WASHINGTON) — John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general and former chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, hammered his old boss in a stunningly public fashion on Tuesday — just two weeks before Election Day.
Kelly, who had previously refrained from discussing his time in the White House so openly, said in expansive interviews with The New York Times that Trump’s discussion of using the military against the “enemy within” — who, in Trump’s words included Democratic foes — pushed him to come forward.
“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly said.
The former general held nothing back, arguing that Trump could fit the bill of a “fascist.”
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he told The Times.
“So, certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” he added.
Kelly went on to explain that Trump had said he wanted generals like those that Adolf Hitler had, a comment that Kelly found shocking and told the former president not to repeat.
The remarks from Kelly, while astounding coming from a veteran who attained such a high ranking in uniform, is just the latest to come from a former senior official in Trump’s administration.
Mark Milley, a retired Army general and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core.”
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” he said.
Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, said earlier this month that he feared Trump would use the military against his domestic critics and that he would likely have fewer guardrails in a hypothetical second term.
“My sense is his inclination is to use the military in these situations whereas my view is that’s a bad role for the military. It should only be law enforcement taking those actions,” Esper said on CNN.
“I think President Trump has learned, the key is getting people around you who will do your bidding, who will not push back, who will implement what you want to do. And I think he’s talked about that, his acolytes have talked about that, and I think loyalty will be the first litmus test,” he added.
Trump throughout his tenure has also praised authoritarians, including boasting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s intelligence, calling North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un “tough” and heaping praise on Hungarian leader Viktor Orban.
Trump’s campaign has hit back at the former officials, including going after Kelly on Tuesday.
“John Kelly has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff and currently suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.
“President Trump has always honored the service and sacrifice of all of our military men and women, whereas Kamala Harris has completely disrespected the families of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, including the Abbey Gate 13,” he added, referencing the 13 service members killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The latest eye-popping comments from Kelly come as early voting is already underway and Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris fight for a small but significant slice of undecided voters.
The Harris campaign on Wednesday morning seized on Kelly’s comments, rolling out Republican former military leaders to both hammer Trump and underscore the seriousness of Kelly’s surprisingly public remarks.
“I had the honor of working aside him, and I know him speaking out this way was no small step for him,” said Kevin Carroll, who served as senior counsel to Kelly when he was Homeland Security secretary under Trump.
Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson mocked the fact that Trump “couldn’t qualify to be in the military — he has 34 felony convictions — so, how can we have the commander-in-chief be in charge of a military that he couldn’t possibly join?”
Harris’ campaign warned that voters should listen to those who have worked alongside Trump while he was president.
“The people who know him best are telling us Trump is unhinged and pursuing unchecked power that would put us all at risk. We should all listen,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement.
However, national debate over Trump’s character has raged largely unabated since 2015, leaving Republicans skeptical the latest comments will make an impact with voters.
GOP pollster Robert Blizzard said it’s “hard to believe this is going to be the ‘ah, gotcha now’ moment for Democrats.”
“I have a difficult time believing there is a single voter that doesn’t have a hard and fast opinion on Donald Trump. They’ve come to that conclusion themselves, and I can’t imagine these people, who the average voter has never heard of, change that opinion,” added a former senior Trump administration official.
