After four years of relatively orderly government, the chaos of the Trump Administration has returned to Washington, D.C. This time, a whole month before the man has even been sworn in again. And Trump, his “boss” Elon, and the hapless Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have delivered 48 hours of madness that accomplished very little other than stressing out anyone who relies on a functioning government and stripping some very worthwhile provisions from the must-pass budget bill.
Let’s recap the events of this week; Wednesday morning was an optimistic day in Washington. A bipartisan continuing resolution was ready for a vote. It would have funded the government through March, giving the incoming new Congress time to get its feet under itself before starting to kick the can down the road once again. But there were some good provisions in the stop-gap funding measure.
Victims of food stamp theft would have those stolen funds returned. Pediatric cancer research was going to receive $190 Million in funding. Medicaid and Medicare recipients were going to be protected from price gouging on prescription drugs. And deepfake pornographic images made by AI would have been criminalized.
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These are all important measures linked by a common theme; protecting the most vulnerable members of our society. The poor, the sick, the elderly, and the vulnerable. But in the era of Elon Musk’s GOP, these measures are a heresy against the oligarchs that Musk and Trump represent.
At 1:17 pm on Wednesday, Musk called for any member of Congress who voted for this bi-partisan budget bill to lose their seats in 2026. He tweeted over 100 times on Wednesday calling for the spending bill to be pulled and any Republican who supported it to be primaried.
Just about four hours later, at 5:13 pm, Donald Trump issued a statement on Truth Social calling for the bill to be pulled and for Congress to pass a “streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
Everything the Democrats want. Like pediatric cancer research. And criminalizing deepfake pornography. And for insurance broker middlemen to stop bilking senior citizens on their prescription drugs.
The bill was pulled, because Republicans apparently can’t stand funding pediatric cancer research, and Speaker Johnson tried again on Thursday. This time, he pushed forward with proposals to separate out the funding into three separate resolutions. One of which would cover the farm bill, another to address disaster aid needs, and a third to cover the rest of the government’s budget.
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Importantly, none of those three bills would fund those “vile” Democrat pork barrel policies I named above. No money for children with cancer, for the elderly, for victims of sexual assault, or theft.
Trump, meanwhile, was calling for a two-year extension on the debt ceiling to be included, hoping to avoid further budget fighting between the start of his presidency and the 2026 mid-term elections.
By Thursday night, the Republican party was in open revolt. The Senate, who had worked hard in negotiating the bipartisan bill that protected vulnerable Americans, wasn’t interested in three separate show votes. Right-wing Republicans actually defected and Johnson’s bill lost 38 members of the House Republican delegation.
It could afford to lose only three and still pass.
So that brings us to Friday. When the House finally managed to pass one single continuing resolution that would fund our government through March. It included almost all of the spending levels that were in the bill 48 hours earlier which set Musk off on his campaign to bully Trump into sinking the bill. It didn’t include the extension to the debt ceiling that Trump wanted. It didn’t include so-called “offsets” that some Republicans had demanded to cut funding from some government programs in exchange for increases in others.
In the end, when all the chaos was behind us and the bill was given to the Senate for swift passage, the Republicans had only accomplished two things.
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First; they reminded us of the pointless chaos that comes with a Trump presidency and gave us fair warning to get prepared for four more years of dysfunction within the Republican party. Though this time, it will be with the addition of the cartoon-villain-level insanity of the world’s richest man shouting at us with the internet as his megaphone.
Second; they managed to show us what they stand for. They stand for limiting the tools prosecutors have to go after monsters who bully teenage girls with deepfake AI pornography. They stand for allowing insurance middlemen to keep lining their pockets with dirty mark-ups on prescription drugs sold to seniors. They stand for refusing to reimburse the victims of food stamp theft, preferring to let our most needy and vulnerable Americans go hungry. And they stand for defunding pediatric cancer research.
The events of this past week are more than just a preview of the dysfunction to come—they are a stark reminder of what happens when chaos is mistaken for governance. The Trump-Musk-Johnson axis has made clear their priorities: performative brinkmanship over pragmatic solutions, and serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful over protecting the most vulnerable among us. As the dust settles on this week’s budget debacle, Americans must ask themselves: Is this really the leadership we want steering our future? Because if the past 48 hours are any indication, the next four years will be defined not by progress, but by regression, disarray, and missed opportunities to lift up those who need it most.
