President-elect Donald Trump isn’t joining calls from some in his party to replace House Speaker Mike Johnson at the start of the next Congress after the Louisiana Republican tanked a bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown, apparently on orders from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Johnson won the gavel last October after a protracted fight following the ouster of former speaker Kevin McCarthy — an event touched off by McCarthy’s decision to allow a vote to fund the government on a bipartisan basis rather than forcing a shutdown until passage of a party-line bill more acceptable to hardline conservatives.
The current speaker has become a target for the rightmost flank of his conference after he and congressional leaders from both parties announced a deal to pass a disaster relief bill, the annual farm bill containing billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies, and other bipartisan priorities in a combined package that would have extended government funding at last year’s fiscal year levels through the end of March.
Musk quickly rallied right-wing influencers against the package with a day-long rant consisting of over 100 posts on X (formerly Twitter), the social media platform he bought in 2022, in which he denounced the 1,500-page piece of legislation as “criminal” and reposted false claims about the content of the bill.
In one such instance, Musk claimed that the proposed legislation included $3 billion to build a new stadium for the Washington Commanders football team. In fact, the bill only authorizes transfer of a federally-owned parcel of land that has long been occupied by the disused football stadium that was used by the team until the early 1990s. Both local and federal officials want the land to be redeveloped for a new stadium that would allow for the Commanders to return to the city after decades playing in suburban Maryland.
Without a deal to fund the government, most non-essential operations will be shuttered after Friday and most employees will have to work without pay until some manner of agreement is reached.
Privately, some members of his party have suggested that the end result of this debacle is that they will back others for Johnson’s post when the next congress convenes on January 3 of next year.
Among those names being floated are Florida Representative Byron Donalds, a hard-right Trump backer who’d be the first Black House speaker if elected to the post, Ohio Representative and House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan, and House Republican Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
But Trump, who spoke to Fox News Digital early Thursday, said he’s still on board with keeping Johnson in the Speaker’s chair, a constitutional office which places him second in the line of presidential succession after the vice president, with a caveat.
He told the outlet that he doesn’t see why Johnson would be replaced so long as he meets certain conditions.
“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” he said.
It’s unclear what specifically Trump would want to see in a government funding bill save for one thing: Language to raise the statutory debt ceiling that could potentially provide leverage for Democrats in the Senate to negotiate for other priorities when the government runs up against that limit next year.
“Anybody that supports a bill that doesn’t take care of the Democrat quicksand known as the debt ceiling should be primaried and disposed of as quickly as possible,” he said.
