However, Congress was well on its way to avoiding this situation on Tuesday when the Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, announced that he had reached an agreement with the Democrats. This notably included more than 100 billion in aid to American regions recently devastated by natural disasters. Alas, the negotiated agreement was torpedoed the next day by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The president-elect denounced a “ridiculous and extraordinarily expensive” text. His ally, the richest man in the world, had launched a virulent burst of posts on his social network X to express his opposition, urging elected officials to “kill the text”.
“President Musk”
The twist took Congress by surprise and gave a glimpse of a Trump 2.0 presidency even before the Republican took office on January 20. With a style – similar to his first mandate – not bothering with conventions, even if it means causing a certain chaos. Elon Musk's resounding opposition also illustrated the growing influence of the boss of SpaceX and Tesla on major political decisions. To the point, for some elected Democrats, of ironizing about a “President Musk”, to whom Donald Trump would be reduced to the role of vassal.
A way out of the impasse was glimpsed on Thursday when the president-elect gave his blessing to a new text, much less detailed, but which included a sine qua non condition for him: a postponement of the deadline on the debt ceiling of the United States until January 2027. The United States has the particularity of regularly coming up against a legal constraint concerning its credit capacity: this debt ceiling, i.e. their maximum amount of debt, must be formally raised or suspended by the Congress. A suspension decided in 2023 expires at the beginning of January and the United States should reach the ceiling in June. Donald Trump therefore declared on Wednesday that he wanted to avoid, upon his return to power, this “vicious trap” set up, according to him, by the Democrats.
“Unacceptable”
But while two-thirds of the votes were necessary for adoption, the new text did not even reach a simple majority, with 38 Republicans joining the Democrats' “no”. The course of action is now uncertain for Mike Johnson, pressed on the one hand by the Democrats to return to the negotiated agreement, and on the other by certain conservative elected officials who are refusing outright any text that does not include a budget cut for compensate for the new aid.
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