Summary
House Speaker Mike Johnson faces growing Republican dissent over his handling of government funding, potentially jeopardizing his reelection as speaker on January 3.
Allies are urging Donald Trump to reaffirm his support for Johnson to avoid a prolonged leadership fight, which could delay certification of Trump’s 2024 election victory on January 6.
Johnson’s bipartisan spending bill, criticized by Trump, narrowly averted a government shutdown but failed to include Trump’s core debt-limit demands.
Some Republicans warn that a speakerless House would disrupt critical legislative processes, including election certification.
It does have precedent though. That’s how Reagan won in a landslide. Very similar circumstances - inflation, small military disaster, uninspiring president. Of course Reagan wasn’t as depraved and dumb as Trump so he won by a lot more.
However inflation definitely has a history of short circuiting voters’ brains. Maybe it has something to do with how the media doesn’t really understand it and does a terrible job explaining it to people. I’d guess at most 5% of voters know that there are multiple inflation measures - some of which were already rising during Trump’s term - and that the typically-reported number is over the last 12 months, not right now (meaning the “record low inflation” at the end of Trump’s term included the whole start of the pandemic when there was deflation). Republicans are great at filling an information vacuum with their narrative, so they said it was Biden’s fault and people fell for that easy explanation.