In a sense, Donald Trump is picking up where he left off. Most of us remember the Capitol insurrection, the last official act of his presidency, but just before that, just before Christmas 2020, he entered late into a fight over government funding in which he had previously been uninterested. Congress had agreed to a bipartisan year-end of an omnibus spending bill that included the first COVID relief measures in nine months. The bills had already passed until Trump decided that some of the spending sounded strange and individuals should receive checks for $2,000 instead of the $600 offered. He refused to sign the omnibus without her.

Within hours, Democrats drafted an expanded checks bill and pushed it through the House, but Mitch McConnell refused to advance it and Trump reluctantly signed the omnibus anyway and scrambled through to the end. The $2,000 checks became an issue in two special elections in Georgia that Republicans lost. The path to the Biden agenda went through Trump’s angry, failed move to renegotiate a deal with Congress after it was finalized.

More from David Dayen

We have been here again almost four years to the day. But this time Trump is a supporting player on the show. Until this week, he and his transition team reportedly had no problem with the 2024 version of a year-end budget bill. Then Elon Musk went into a frenzy about how a perfectly normal bipartisan agreement was a complete betrayal, and lied about its contents. Trump had to be galvanized into supporting his co-president by getting House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to find a partisan solution while instituting a last-minute, two-year suspension of the debt ceiling Prevent a Republican trifecta from having to deal with this nuisance in the next Congress.

The remaining Tea Party supporters, who see the debt limit as just an opportunity to force spending cuts, refused to agree to this proposal. 38 of them rejected the Johnson bill yesterday. Democrats weren’t about to vote for a bill they had no say in (if the offer was to eliminate the debt limit forever, they should vote for it, but that’s not all), and it failed. House Republicans vow to try again today, but they’ll likely need a two-thirds majority on anything today (it’s procedurally complicated; suffice to say, they can’t wait for the Rules Committee to table a rule and force a vote). ). suspension of these rules). This means that any bill requires Democratic votes and there is no indication that negotiations with Democrats are underway. So the government will close at midnight.

This brings us back to the original reason for the explosion: Elon’s endless scroll. Which is apparently unrelated to the inaccurate reasons he gave on The original bill would have made it more difficult for Musk to build Tesla factories in Shanghai.

The word for it is oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t think about the country first.

This is the first scandal of Trump’s second term, and watch closely, because it will look like all the other scandals: a conflict of interest between his incredibly wealthy advisers and aides (or Trump himself) is seeping into politics.

The measure in question is called the “outbound investment” provision. For years we have heard about the problem of manufacturing companies moving jobs overseas to China, where workers’ wages are low and environmental standards are low. China typically forces companies that want to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use them, with government support, to undercut rivals in global markets.

Congress has been annoyed about China for years and finally found a way to deal with the problem. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have introduced the flagship bill that would either ban U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or a comprehensive one Notification would introduce regime around him.

The bill would also add some reporting requirements and enhanced reviews; In general, it expands the restrictions that the Treasury Department has already proposed in the regulatory framework. The codification of these rules in law means that they cannot be changed by successive administrations.

Cornyn-Casey passed the Senate last year, and after about a year of legislative wrangling, a final outbound investment package made it into the year-end bill. “We are taking a necessary step to protect American innovation from bad actors and ensure our continued dominance on the world stage,” Cornyn said in a statement.

Funny story: Elon Musk’s car company invests significantly abroad. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; Perhaps a quarter of the company’s sales come from China. Musk has advocated building a second Tesla factory in China, where his control over the electric vehicle market has been completely loosened in the face of domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “full self-driving” technology to China, importing technology that may be considered sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that don’t yet exist in China, but he may want to have them there in the future.

It’s debatable whether the US should restrict investment in China. But it is undeniable that a billionaire who has made a lot of investments in China and wants to make more has suddenly disrupted a normal congressional process that was supposed to restrict those investments with a series of lies from his media platform. Lo and behold, when the new financing law was passed, the outbound investment function was removed. In fact, all traces of China-related provisions have been removed from the bill.

Donald Trump portrays himself as someone who is determined to “get tough on China.” But he has empowered someone with serious business entanglements in China to appear to serve as an obstacle to any China-related policy for the next four years.

The current occupant of the White House (remember him) picked up on this. In a statement, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted: “Republicans are going back on their word and supporting a bipartisan deal that would lower the cost of prescription drugs and make it harder to relocate jobs to China.” prescription drugs is related to a comprehensive reform of pharmacy benefit management, which was also removed from the new bill.

That’s why Donald Trump, ostensible leader of the populist Republican realignment, killed a spending bill designed primarily to boost the world’s richest man’s investments in China and the profits of UnitedHealth Group, owner of the world’s second-largest pharmacy benefit manager. to protect.

This will be an ongoing theme over the next four years. Personal business interests will continually take precedence over governance in the Trump/Musk White House. The word for it is oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t think about the country first. Millions of federal workers, including military personnel, won’t see their paychecks over Christmas, national parks will be closed, food inspections and countless other government functions will be halted because one Elon Musk doesn’t want anyone snooping around his business in China.

Happy New Year.