The president-elect was eager to evade responsibility for the consequences of a potential shutdown even as he blew up a bipartisan deal that would have kept the government open.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who derailed a bipartisan spending deal in Congress, tried on Friday to escape responsibility for the consequences, saying it would be better to let the government shut down under President Biden’s watch than to allow a politically damaging stalemate once he takes office next month.
“This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!” Mr. Trump said in a social media post Friday morning. Earlier, at 1:16 a.m., Mr. Trump said he wanted Mr. Biden to be blamed for whatever political fallout might come, writing to Republicans: “Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”
In other words, let the blame game begin. Mr. Trump’s comment signaled that he understood the clock that was ticking. In 31 days, he will take the oath of office, returning him to power — but also to accountability — after a four-year absence.
Early Saturday, the Senate followed the House in passing a slimmed-down, temporary spending measure, extending funding into mid-March and clearing the way to keep the government open — for now.
But even with a shutdown averted, the episode demonstrated a well-established pattern by Mr. Trump. He often purposely blew up congressional negotiations during his first term, often with a tweet, only to be forced to retreat or give up his position in the face of an angry reaction from both allies and adversaries.
In 2018, Mr. Trump told lawmakers in the Oval Office that he would be “proud” to shut the government down if he did not get funding for a wall along the southern border. After a 35-day shutdown that extended through Christmas and New Year’s Day, Mr. Trump relented, agreeing to Democratic demands without getting the funding for his wall.
“There were certainly plenty of times where he went off script, but there were always people around who could rush to the White House get it resolved,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to House Speaker Paul Ryan during Mr. Trump’s first term. “This feels a little different, like it’s just sort of this voice-of-God Twitter account that is directing things.”
Still, Mr. Trump has benefited politically over the long run by seeking to bend lawmakers to his will. His supporters returned him to the White House in the election this year in part to resume that effort, but with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and a president who has a better understanding of how Washington works.
In the halls of Congress on Friday, Republican lawmakers scrambled throughout the day to come up with a way to avoid the government shutdown.
The stopgap legislation does not include Mr. Trump’s demand from earlier in the week to suspend the nation’s debt limit for several years. That demand was opposed by conservative lawmakers in a rare rebuke of Mr. Trump by his own party.
Just five days before Christmas, Mr. Trump remained at his sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., hundreds of miles from the frantic effort on Capitol Hill to prevent a damaging holiday shutdown. Not long after his social media post Friday morning, Mr. Trump headed to his nearby golf course, where he was for several hours before returning to Mar-a-Lago in the afternoon. He made no comments on the legislative debate most of the day.
But the president-elect’s influence has been hard to miss.
It was just two days ago that Mr. Trump, along with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, set the stage for a potential shutdown by demanding that Republicans reject a bipartisan spending deal that had been negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican. That led Congress to the brink of another year-end crisis that could have left the federal government without the authority to spend money just days before Christmas.
Had a shutdown happened, it would probably have resembled past ones, including the cancellation of key services, temporary furloughs of federal workers and deep anger among Americans about the dysfunction of their government.
The Biden administration had already begun preparing for a potential shutdown. The Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to cabinet agencies to take precautions in the event Congress did not come to an agreement on a stopgap measure in time, according to an official familiar with the matter. Senior officials at some agencies met to discuss shutdown preparations on Friday morning.
“The choice to allow a transition to move forward is in the hands of Republicans in Congress, you know?” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Friday. “We can continue to have this smooth transition of power if they stop threatening a shutdown.”
Ms. Jean-Pierre warned before the House’s Friday night vote that Mr. Trump’s own transition and inauguration could suffer in the event of a shutdown.
“I don’t want to get too much into hypotheticals, but this is the reality — transition activities will be restricted,” she warned. “With limited exceptions obviously, such as prevent imminent threats to the safety of human life or the protection of property.”
