Trump Wanted Shutdown to Happen on Biden’s Watch, Not His

 

Trump Wanted Shutdown to Happen on Biden’s Watch, Not His

 

The president-elect was eager to evade responsibility for the consequences of a potential shutdown even as he blew up a bipartisan deal that would have kept the government open.

 

Michael D. ShearMaggie Haberman

By Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman

Reporting from Washington

Published Dec. 20, 2024

Updated Dec. 21, 2024, 2:23 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/us/politics/trump-blame-shutdown.html

 

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who derailed a bipartisan spending deal in Congress, tried on Friday to escape responsibility for the consequences, saying it would be better to let the government shut down under President Biden’s watch than to allow a politically damaging stalemate once he takes office next month.

 

“This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!” Mr. Trump said in a social media post Friday morning. Earlier, at 1:16 a.m., Mr. Trump said he wanted Mr. Biden to be blamed for whatever political fallout might come, writing to Republicans: “Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”

 

In other words, let the blame game begin. Mr. Trump’s comment signaled that he understood the clock that was ticking. In 31 days, he will take the oath of office, returning him to power — but also to accountability — after a four-year absence.

 

Early Saturday, the Senate followed the House in passing a slimmed-down, temporary spending measure, extending funding into mid-March and clearing the way to keep the government open — for now.

 

But even with a shutdown averted, the episode demonstrated a well-established pattern by Mr. Trump. He often purposely blew up congressional negotiations during his first term, often with a tweet, only to be forced to retreat or give up his position in the face of an angry reaction from both allies and adversaries.

 

In 2018, Mr. Trump told lawmakers in the Oval Office that he would be “proud” to shut the government down if he did not get funding for a wall along the southern border. After a 35-day shutdown that extended through Christmas and New Year’s Day, Mr. Trump relented, agreeing to Democratic demands without getting the funding for his wall.

 

“There were certainly plenty of times where he went off script, but there were always people around who could rush to the White House get it resolved,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to House Speaker Paul Ryan during Mr. Trump’s first term. “This feels a little different, like it’s just sort of this voice-of-God Twitter account that is directing things.”

 

Still, Mr. Trump has benefited politically over the long run by seeking to bend lawmakers to his will. His supporters returned him to the White House in the election this year in part to resume that effort, but with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and a president who has a better understanding of how Washington works.

 

In the halls of Congress on Friday, Republican lawmakers scrambled throughout the day to come up with a way to avoid the government shutdown.

 

The stopgap legislation does not include Mr. Trump’s demand from earlier in the week to suspend the nation’s debt limit for several years. That demand was opposed by conservative lawmakers in a rare rebuke of Mr. Trump by his own party.

 

Just five days before Christmas, Mr. Trump remained at his sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., hundreds of miles from the frantic effort on Capitol Hill to prevent a damaging holiday shutdown. Not long after his social media post Friday morning, Mr. Trump headed to his nearby golf course, where he was for several hours before returning to Mar-a-Lago in the afternoon. He made no comments on the legislative debate most of the day.

 

But the president-elect’s influence has been hard to miss.

 

It was just two days ago that Mr. Trump, along with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, set the stage for a potential shutdown by demanding that Republicans reject a bipartisan spending deal that had been negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican. That led Congress to the brink of another year-end crisis that could have left the federal government without the authority to spend money just days before Christmas.

 

Had a shutdown happened, it would probably have resembled past ones, including the cancellation of key services, temporary furloughs of federal workers and deep anger among Americans about the dysfunction of their government.

 

The Biden administration had already begun preparing for a potential shutdown. The Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to cabinet agencies to take precautions in the event Congress did not come to an agreement on a stopgap measure in time, according to an official familiar with the matter. Senior officials at some agencies met to discuss shutdown preparations on Friday morning.

 

“The choice to allow a transition to move forward is in the hands of Republicans in Congress, you know?” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Friday. “We can continue to have this smooth transition of power if they stop threatening a shutdown.”

 

Ms. Jean-Pierre warned before the House’s Friday night vote that Mr. Trump’s own transition and inauguration could suffer in the event of a shutdown.

 

“I don’t want to get too much into hypotheticals, but this is the reality — transition activities will be restricted,” she warned. “With limited exceptions obviously, such as prevent imminent threats to the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

 

On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump tried to head off those possibilities by urging his party’s lawmakers to vote for a different Republican bill that would have suspended the nation’s debt limit and delayed a legislative reckoning until 2027, well into his second term. More than three dozen conservative Republicans voted against Mr. Trump’s wishes, dooming the legislation.

 

With spending set to run out after midnight Friday, the president-elect tried to shift the burden of leadership back to Mr. Biden, who had been all but absent from the spending negotiations and had said little about the stalemate. (In a statement earlier in the week, Ms. Jean-Pierre accused Mr. Trump of ordering a shutdown and said: “A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”)

 

Privately, Mr. Trump told allies and advisers that he did not oppose a government shutdown, according to two people with knowledge of what he has said. He insisted that Democrats would have shouldered the blame for any disruption of government services that voters experienced, a point he has made publicly, too.

 

Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, also tried to blame Mr. Biden, saying in a statement earlier on Friday, “If the government shuts down, the onus is on Joe Biden, who has been hiding away since Election Day.”

 

Mr. Trump has pushed for shutdowns consistently over time, primarily as a leverage tool. Some advisers in his first term told him that there were ways to minimize the pain that taxpayers experienced in a shutdown — a message that apparently stuck with him.

 

In May 2023, Kevin McCarthy, then the speaker of the House, reached a budget deal with Mr. Biden that included some spending cuts and suspended the debt ceiling through this coming weekend. Mr. Trump was furious. He wanted Mr. McCarthy to let the government default on its debts instead of striking a deal that would benefit Mr. Biden, who was running for a second term at the time, two people briefed on the events said.

 

Mr. Trump’s advisers believe voters are more preoccupied with the holidays than they are with the ins and outs of congressional negotiations. But while Mr. Trump is technically correct that a shutdown would be Mr. Biden’s problem now, it could have become a problem for the president-elect if it dragged on.

 

The driving conceit this time was that Mr. Trump — and Mr. Musk, an ally, funder and multibillionaire new friend whom he has put in charge of cutting government costs — believed that the initial bipartisan deal was stuffed with too much bloat and too many Democratic priorities. A shutdown, from that perspective, was preferable.

 

That appeared to be difficult for lawmakers to swallow when Mr. Trump was arguing that he wanted to remove or raise the debt ceiling — something that was not in the initial deal — which would allow government spending to continue to increase.

 

“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday, hours before he called for a shutdown. “Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”

 

Mr. Buck, who once jumped off the treadmill to call his boss when Mr. Trump tweeted an early morning veto threat for a carefully negotiated spending bill, said the president-elect’s last-minute interference this week appeared to suggest that he had not been working closely with Republican lawmakers.

 

“It feels as though he just woke up to the reality of what happens here has a significant impact on his ability to govern over the next six months,” Mr. Buck said.

 

Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Biden and his administration. He has reported on politics for more than 30 years. More about Michael D. Shear

 

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman