'Aging, tired' Trump's GOP now being 'held together by safety pins': analyst

President-elect Donald Trump is in charge of a party falling apart at the seams before he even takes office, wrote Amanda Marcotte in a Salon analysis published on Monday. This comes amid reporting that Trump is already needled by Democrats' newly emboldened attack strategy of painting him as second fiddle to tech billionaire Elon Musk, who by all accounts was the architect of last week's chaos that collapsed a bipartisan spending deal and briefly appeared to put America on track for a government shutdown over the holidays. With hours to spare before that shutdown would take effect, Marcotte noted, "Democrats handed Musk — sorry, Trump — the first major loss of his presidency, a presidency which technically doesn't start for another month. MAGA was never coherent ideologically but held together by Trump's cult of personality" — and Democrats appear to be done licking their wounds and are now ready to fight, with a newly found strategy that is genuinely doing damage. Their message, though, goes beyond simply saying that Trump is beholden to Musk and hoping it drives him up the wall, Marcotte argued — it's a coherent, ideological narrative that could become Trump's Achilles heel for holding together his entire coalition.