DAVID MARCUS: De facto President Trump's handling of shutdown threat was a masterclass

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

48% : Yet, when the dust settled, we had shed 1,400 pages of blundering B.S. with nary a peep from Biden.CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONTrump's first term as president, though a success in many ways, was marred by Democrats' incessant and absurd investigations into nothing, but also, in fairness, by a bit of naïveté from Trump himself.
40% : Prior to the intervention by Trump, it looked for all the world like House Speaker Mike Johnson would stuff the Democrats' stockings with pork and goodies to ensure that a shutdown did not mar next month's inauguration.DOGE LEADER ELON MUSK SENDS 'SHOCKWAVES' THROUGH THE CAPITOL OVER MASSIVE SPENDING BILLJohnson believed that enough Republicans would simply sigh and go along with the continuing resolution that he negotiated with the Democrats, and there was some logic to allowing sleeping dogs to lie until Trump takes over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Republicans take the senate in January.
40% : Former GOP Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich knows a thing or two about how the congressional sausage gets made, and here is what he had to say on X:"Shrinking the continuing resolution from 1,547 pages to 118 pages is a major victory for President Trump and shows that the election did matter and he is really the de facto President while President Biden was absent and passive.
37% : In the space of just a few days, Trump's pressure on the Congress, including siccing his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attack dogs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on reckless spending, turned a 1,500 page monstrosity of a bill into a slim 120-page banger of basic necessities, including disaster relief and help for farmers.
34% : Trump was new to Washington and its mendacious machinations in 2017, but not anymore.
32% : With the target softened, Trump tore into the bill, going so far as to threaten lawmakers who voted for it with primary challenges.
22% : Donald Trump will not be president of the United States for another month, at least not literally.
16% : Trump even indicated that Johnson's speakership could be in doubt if he did not get in line.
8% : "It was fascinating how people all week tried to paint the budget mess as Republicans in disarray with House members defying Trump and looming trouble between Trump and Musk.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.