Trump's Surprise Debt Demand Signals A Return To Chaotic Governance

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : This provision could not be undone through the reconciliation process that circumvents a Senate filibuster, meaning Republicans would be forced to choose among three options: 1) fully offsetting the cost of extending partisan tax cuts, 2) working with Democrats on a bipartisan tax reform bill through regular order instead of the reconciliation process, 3) triggering a debt ceiling debate that reminds the American people Republican tax policies are responsible for worsening our debt situation.
47% : If Democrats are going to give Trump the win now, they should do so in a way that advances responsible fiscal policy, not budget-busting tax cuts.
46% : Effectively, Trump is a broken clock, and the two times of day he is right are when it serves his own interests.
45% : Trump's subsequent justifications are actually quite reasonable: the debt ceiling doesn't prevent the federal government from approving spending more money than it takes in through tax collections.
41% : If Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk are so quick to undermine legislation negotiated by their own party's House speaker, who has a far narrower majority to work with than his predecessor did in 2018, the country is likely to be in for uniquely high levels of government dysfunction over the next two years.
41% : But interestingly, in a statement that briefly echoed many of the critiques from their right-wing allies, Trump and Vance focused on a new demand that had never even been discussed in negotiations: raising or repealing the federal debt ceiling that is set to go back into effect next year.
35% : But his decision to sabotage a bipartisan deal at the eleventh hour and risk triggering a government shutdown just to ease the scrutiny of his budget-busting agenda next year is likely a harbinger of the chaos to come next year when Trump officially returns to power.
32% : Trump says the debt ceiling is either "a catastrophe or meaningless" -- and he's actually right.
32% : Trump likely does not want a debt-ceiling debate next year because, even though the debt ceiling doesn't have substantive effects on our debt, it usually triggers a national conversation about our unsustainable fiscal trajectory.
18% : But during the Biden administration, Trump repeatedly called on Republicans not to raise the debt ceiling, even though his critiques were as true then as they are now.

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