President-elect Donald Trump has long supported House Speaker Mike Johnson — hosting him on election night, bringing him to the Army-Navy college football game last weekend and backing him privately despite conservative complaints about the House’s actions.
That’s why it stunned many Republicans when Elon Musk — with Trump’s go-ahead — helped tank Johnson’s short-term government funding deal Wednesday afternoon by unleashing a barrage of social media posts starting early in the morning and calling the deal “criminal.”
Trump followed up with threats to oppose any Republican who voted for it in a 2026 primary. And he injected another complication, calling for the debt ceiling — a tool Republicans have used for years to pressure Democrats into spending cuts — to be lifted or eliminated entirely before he takes office. With funding expiring at the end of the night on Friday, Trump’s last-minute demands pushed the government perilously close to a shutdown.
The broadsides from Mar-a-Lago left Republican lawmakers wondering — given how much the president-elect and the House speaker communicate — why it took until the final moment for the dramatic schism between Trump and Johnson to burst into view, and for the deal to fall apart.
“It’s all very strange,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN. “This was completely avoidable.”
By Thursday evening, Trump was backing Johnson again as he tried to advance a different plan that sought to appease the GOP standard bearer’s demands. The 24-hour whiplash both underscored Johnson’s weakness and Musk’s opening with Trump. The bill — which would have extended government funding for three months, lifted the debt ceiling until 2027, extended the farm bill and included $110 billion for disaster relief — failed, with 38 Republicans voting against it.
The chaotic series of events has left House leadership scrambling, and the episode has raised questions about how Republicans on Capitol Hill, with a narrow majority and competing factions, will function once Trump takes office.
And now Democrats, who helped Johnson save his job last spring, say they are through helping the Louisiana Republican manage his unruly conference.
Trump wants ‘decks cleared’
Johnson was already close to an agreement with congressional leaders on a short-term measure to fund the government when he sat in a private box with the president-elect at the Army-Navy game last weekend.
In video captured from the game, Trump can be seen deep in conversation with Johnson, incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
Trump, according to people familiar with the discussion, told Johnson that he wanted a full-year spending bill — not a short-term resolution — and that he wanted the debt limit to be a part of that deal.
“He wanted the decks cleared,” one source with knowledge of the conversation told CNN, alluding to Trump’s desire to begin his term with the more contentious spending fights in the rearview mirror so Congress could focus on enacting his agenda.
At the game, Johnson, the source said, tried to placate the president-elect without promising to deliver on those specific demands — while acknowledging there was nowhere near enough time to reach agreement on the various bills that comprise legislation covering the government’s annual spending, known as an “omnibus.”
Later in the week, sources said Trump was polling allies and advisers on what they believed were the pros and cons of a short-term funding measure or the longer-term bill he started demanding publicly on Wednesday.
“It started when the text came out and some of the details were being reported out. Up until that point, he was still trying to understand the pros and cons of short-term versus long term,” a Trump adviser told CNN. “Once the bill text came out and the pork of it was being reported, he wanted to get involved.”
Throughout Wednesday, Trump and Musk discussed their opposition to bill — even before Musk began intensely attacking the package on X. Both were in agreement that it gave too much to Democrats and was too expensive. Sources close to Trump insist that Musk was in lockstep with the president-elect when he took to X to go after the proposal and anyone who potentially voted in favor of it, although Democrats raised alarms that Musk’s public opposition, which came before Trump’s, was a sign of his power over the president-elect.
Vance has been tasked to be Trump’s eyes and ears on the Hill, and is handling the bulk of the discussion with Johnson. On Wednesday night, the vice president-elect was seen heading into the speaker’s office with Republican leadership, while Trump enjoyed dinner with Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump has been calling lawmakers on the matter but is letting Vance – an Ohio senator for a couple weeks longer – deal with the nitty gritty behind closed doors, a source familiar with the discussions said.
Debt ceiling questions
Trump’s allies in Mar-a-Lago had reached out to the speaker and his team in recent weeks, telegraphing the president-elect’s desire to deal with the debt limit before taking office.
But his position wasn’t widely known. The conventional wisdom, according to several Trump allies, advisers and GOP officials, had been that they’d grapple with the debt ceiling as part of forthcoming talks on a spending bill in March, or a party-line package to implement Trump’s immigration and energy priorities.
And even in conversations one week ago, three sources suggested the debt ceiling was on no one’s radar, with at least one Trump ally telling CNN, “That will be a June issue.” Adding such a politically toxic debate to the lame-duck to-do list was a plot twist.
“Inserting the debt ceiling conversation certainly added a new element,” a Trump adviser told CNN.
The transition did not respond to a request for comment. CNN has reached out to Johnson’s office.
Trump, as he and his aides have communicated, wants to start the new Congress and his second term with a clean slate — and without the potential for Democrats to retain a bargaining chip that could dilute their agenda.
Emboldened by even a razor-thin majority in both chambers, Trump believes Republicans will be in a more powerful position to demand steeper spending cuts during negotiations next year.
“Mar-a-Lago has signaled a lot of questioning about letting a debt limit slide into next year,” a source involved in the conversations told CNN, referring to the Palm Beach members’ club where Trump and his advisers have been crafting policy positions behind closed doors. “Why are we letting something that will be a Dem leverage point remain in place for the next year?”
Wednesday’s collapse
As recently as Wednesday afternoon around 1 p.m., House GOP leaders were telling fellow Republicans that they felt “positive” about having the votes to pass the negotiated deal, according to multiple sources close to the talks. Many GOP lawmakers weren’t happy with the measure — especially given the rushed timeline — but it seemed they were willing to swallow it.
A whip count, though, made clear Johnson did not have the Republican support he’d need to pass the measure with Democratic help.
One Republican attributed the lack of communication between Johnson’s office and rank-and-file members for why leadership was out of step with where the conference was. Lawmakers, for example, were surprised to find out that a pay raise for themselves was included.
“We knew 92% of what this was going to be well before, but that last 8% was doozy,” Pennsylvania Rep. Dan Meuser told CNN.
The bill may have been “already dead” by mid-day Wednesday, as one GOP lawmaker put it, but Musk’s megaphone made sure it was buried.
Social media posts by Musk and Donald Trump Jr. fueled a surge of disgruntled phone calls to lawmakers’ offices.
By around 3 p.m., one GOP source described the situation as “collapsing.” And Johnson’s troubles quickly evolved from internal grumbles about the funding bill to major, public questions about his future as speaker. By Thursday morning, one of the most vocal House conservatives, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, seemed to have reversed her support for the Louisiana Republican and was openly floating the unlikely situation of Musk for speaker.
Multiple frustrated Republicans have told Johnson and his leadership team that they should have voted Wednesday when they had the votes, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
“We will re-group and we will come up with another solution,” Johnson told reporters after the Thursday vote failed. “So stay tuned.”
