Trump and Musk show how not to conduct the nation’s business

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/21/shutdown-deal-trump-musk-debt-limit/

Mr. Trump should not have spurred a last-minute frenzy to keep the government running during the holidays when a reasonable bipartisan compromise had already been reached. The negotiators’ job was made harder by the fact that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the president-elect’s confidant tasked with making the government more “efficient,” seemed to be at cross-purposes in their demands. Mr. Musk said the stopgap’s spending levels were “criminal” and called for shutting down the government until Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when Republicans would have more leverage to deny line items Democrats wanted. Chiming in later, Mr. Trump criticized some of the spending but also issued a very different demand: that Congress lift the debt limit or eliminate it entirely, which would have required Democratic buy-in, given the narrow majorities in Congress and some Republicans’ aversion to raising the fiscal ceiling.