To describe the historic start of Jayden Daniels’ rookie season, Washington Commanders head coach Dan Quinn referenced the supernatural.  

“I definitely understand our fan base has been waiting for the franchise QB,” Quinn said in late September, “but I also don’t want Jayden feeling any ghosts.”

The ghosts of QBs past have haunted Washington for decades. Daniels became the 27th quarterback to start a game for the franchise since 2000. The “ghosts” included Gus Frerotte and Jason Campbell, Kirk Cousins and Robert Griffin III, Ryan Fitzpatrick (for one quarter) and Alex Smith, Mark Brunell and Donovan McNabb.  

Then the quarterback of the future – or the ghost of QB present, depending on one’s perspective – arrived. Daniels is the favorite to win Offensive Rookie of the Year, and the Commanders are 9-5 for the first time since 1992.

It’s not the first time a rookie in Washington, taken second overall that year, has set the league on fire and looked like a franchise-changing player. But even Griffin III – perhaps the most relevant “ghost” Quinn alluded to – sees a promising future for Daniels and the Commanders.

“I think he’s handled this year like a franchise quarterback,” Griffin III told USA TODAY Sports. “That’s something that this team hasn’t had in decades.”

Daniels and the Commanders reeled off four straight victories after losing in Week 1 to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The San Bernardino, California, native’s completion percentage through his first four games was 82.1%, the highest of any player in NFL history over a four-game stretch, breaking a record that belonged to Tom Brady. He became the first quarterback to have two consecutive games with a completion of 85% or better. Despite a hip injury he suffered against the Carolina Panthers in Week 7, Daniels has thrown for 3,045 yards with 17 touchdowns and seven interceptions through 14 starts.

After his historic 2012 campaign, Griffin III acknowledged things went “sideways” for him in Washington. The devastating knee injury he suffered in the playoffs that season against the Seattle Seahawks did him no favors. Neither did the emergence of Cousins, who started for three seasons but likely won’t be facing Daniels and the Commanders when the Atlanta Falcons visit on Dec. 29.

“Jayden, I think, is off to a great start … I think anything I would tell him, he would already know,” Cousins said earlier this season. “And he seems to be enjoying it, has a smile on his face, he’s playing well.”

With managing partner Josh Harris and his ownership group, general manager Adam Peters and Quinn, the Commanders’ infrastructure is much healthier now for a young quarterback than it was when he starred for the franchise, Griffin III said.

“He doesn’t ‘need’ me. I never want people to feel like these guys ‘need’ someone, but to be able to use that experience, to help him navigate some of the things that affected you and your career?” said Griffin III, who formed a relationship with Daniels by calling three of his college games at LSU and has stayed in contact since the rookie landed with Washington. “I think that’s valuable to give back. That’s what I try to do, I try to approach it – but back then, I didn’t know what I know now. And I can use what I know now to help the next generation.”

While Daniels displayed a knowledge of the team’s quarterback struggles along with the tradition of Black signal-callers going back to Doug Williams, the fan base’s starvation for a franchise quarterback caught Griffin III by surprise. He didn’t grow up learning about sports in that way, he said.

“It’s early,” Williams told USA TODAY’s Jarrett Bell earlier this season. “You don’t want to put no pressure on the kid. You want him to play football. You don’t even want to bring it to his attention. You don’t even want to talk about it. We’ve still got a long way to go.

“The fans are excited, and they’ve got a reason to be excited. But if you work in the football office here, that’s what you try to protect against.”

Performance under pressure

That type of pressure could fluster any young professional, said Alex Smith, taken No. 1 by the San Francisco 49ers in 2005 before spending time with the Kansas City Chiefs and Washington.

“When you’re a top pick, that expectation’s there – to come in and turn the organization around. That’s part of the weight that I think QB’s have to deal with,” Smith told USA TODAY Sports.

Because there were six quarterbacks taken in the top 12 picks of the 2024 draft, they’ll all be compared to one another for their entire careers, Smith said – similar to how Griffin III and Andrew Luck were coupled as 2012 draftmates, or Smith and Aaron Rodgers from the Class of 2005.

“It just kind of continues to mount, just kind of continues to grow,” Smith said of the pressure.

Smith doesn’t know Daniels personally, but everything he’s heard from people in the building indicates that he’s somebody who is “so prepared for even the weight of that conversation, of being the savior.”

“That’s part of what Jayden here is battling – maybe the greatest start to a rookie season of all time and continuing to not let all of the hype – or any of the hype – get to him,” Smith said.

Joe Theismann, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback for Washington, said he’s seen Daniels handle his “fanship” up close. People ask him how Daniels can possibly deal with the expectations.

Theismann offers a one-word answer: “Heisman.”

Daniels, following three seasons at Arizona State, transferred to LSU in 2022 and won the 2023 Heisman Trophy.  

“Being where he is, as far as the media goes, as far as the exposure goes, as far as the expectations go, it’s not something new to him,” Theismann said. “It just hasn’t all of a sudden happened.”

About halfway through last season at LSU, he accepted that his name would be a constant part of the national conversation through the draft. He turned on the television and people were talking about him.

“It’s kind of awkward to see people talk about you,” Daniels said in October. “I don’t really like it, so I kind of try to stay away from that. But it’s kind of normal to me now.”

And social media is a totally different realm of fan expectations and reaction.

“It’s a lot. I mean, I see it,” he said. “I don’t really pay attention. I don’t look too much into it, but just know I’ll be seeing some stuff for sure. It is in the back of my mind for sure.”

For Fitzpatrick, while evaluating college prospects, whether they’ve experienced adversity is something he monitors.

“It wasn’t just a straight path for him to the Heisman and to the top of the NFL,” Fitzpatrick told USA TODAY Sports.

The transition to the NFL left quite an impression, though.

“It’s almost as if Jayden doesn’t know that football is supposed to be hard,” Fitzpatrick said. “When you watch it, he makes it look so easy. I go back to, you know, for him, one of the great things that he has going for right now is that he’s so athletic and he’s a really intelligent player.

“If he doesn’t like what he’s seeing again, going back to that, he has the ultimate ‘get-out-jail-free’ card, which is, he’s going to be able to scramble around. He’s going to be able to make plays either with his legs or he’s great at throwing on the run.”

And even though Fitzpatrick suffered a hip injury during the first half of the season-opener in 2021, his only game in Washington, he “definitely” sensed the desire from fans to have an answer at quarterback.

“I think the thing that appealed to me even a couple of years ago in Washington was there was a lot of talent,” Fitzpatrick, now an analyst with Amazon Prime Video, said. “You always talk about young guys walking into situations where there’s a good infrastructure, and some of that is coaching and a lot of that is the players that you have around them.”

From rebuild to excitement

Ron Rivera was hired as head coach in 2020 and had a roster, particularly on defense, that looked ready to contend. But the revolving door at quarterback – Taylor Heinecke, Carson Wentz, Sam Howell and Kyle Allen all started for his teams – made that difficult beyond the 2020 NFC East title, which was won with a 7-9 record.

“When you’re looking for that guy, that’s the hardest thing to find,” Rivera told USA TODAY Sports. “There’s so much emphasis put into it.

“I really do see the improvement in them because of the play of the young quarterback and the last time we saw that was with RGIII when he was (with Washington) and he was healthy.”

Unlike with Griffin III, however, Rivera recognized almost immediately Washington fans’ clamoring for a quarterback to call their long-term answer.

“Mostly because having been in the league and trying to find that guy again and how hard it is, when you’re never set up to get that guy, that’s tough, that really is,” said Rivera, who was let go after last season and replaced with Quinn.

Smith said he understood that Washington was a proud, storied franchise.

“There have been little moments of success and nothing sustained and nothing, certainly, to the expectations of that fan base and organization,” said Smith, an analyst for ESPN.

At the late stage in his career when he arrived in Washington, he felt prepared to enter that type of environment and embraced it.

“It was an amazing challenge, probably short-lived, and also very cool – I loved the history of the organization and certainly the aspiration to get back to that,” Smith said. “It was not totally different from what I experienced with the Niners in that regard.”

During Rivera’s tenure, the Commanders went from having a defense that was ready to be a contender without the proper quarterback to requiring an entire rebuild – starting at quarterback.

“I think that’s been that’s been the feeling in Washington for a while … there’s more excitement in Washington right now than maybe anywhere in the league and the fact that they found, I mean, new ownership and the fact that they found their guy quarterback,” Fitzpatrick said.

Looking at the team now, Rivera sees a core of veterans and younger players to complement Daniels.

“You have an opportunity to establish who this team could be for the future,” he said.

On behalf of the fan base that had its collective patience tested, Smith said he’s enjoyed watching the team compete for a division title ahead of schedule.

“They’ve deserved better for a long, long time,” he said. “Just to see the way the team is playing right now and the energy of the entire area, it’s been really cool to watch from afar.”

Quinn said he wanted Daniels to understand “there’s only one name on the back of that jersey, and that’s for him.” The coach also said he can’t wait to see who Daniels is becoming because he is a 24-year-old who is still growing.

“I don’t want to compare him to anybody but him,” Quinn said.

Not even a ghost.

CNN
 — 

Welcome to the new Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

The president-elect and the world’s richest man combined Wednesday to smash a short-term spending compromise orchestrated by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the government open until early in Trump’s new term.

The stop-gap measure is packed with nearly $100 billion in aid for Americans hit by multiple national disasters, economic aid for farmers, a federal commitment to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and a criminalization of revenge porn.

But the Trump-Musk blocking maneuver plunged the capital into one of its classic year-end crises, pitched Johnson’s hopes of keeping his job into extreme doubt and offered a preview of the chaos that may churn in Trump’s second term.

A sense of turmoil was exacerbated by the 10th straight day of losses on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, matching a mark set in the Ford administration. The selloffs underlined a volatile national moment and some of the economic challenges Trump may face after the Federal Reserve warned that inflation will tick up next year.

The sabotaging of Johnson’s funding initiative triggered shock and confusion on Capitol Hill. But for many of Trump’s supporters and boosters in the conservative media who are anticipating massive cuts to federal programs, the mayhem is the point. Even if the impasse leads to a damaging government shutdown, that may represent progress for some since the government itself is viewed with disdain on the populist right. And by taking aim at the Washington status quo even before he takes the oath of office, Trump is doing exactly what he said he’d do on the campaign trail.

But the sudden imbroglio also highlighted one of the key issues facing Trump in his second term: If he wants to pass his tax cuts, push through his immigration overhauls, defend the country and leave a meaningful legacy, he will have to find some way to govern – even if that draws him into conflict with base voters and MAGA ideologues who seem happy to burn government to the ground.

One of those mega disruptors is Musk. In his biography of the SpaceX pioneer, Walter Isaacson described the philosophy of the president-elect’s new super buddy as “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat.”

The rocket mogul lived up to that mantra on Wednesday, unleashing assaults on Johnson’s plans before dawn. “This bill should not pass,” Musk wrote on X, opening a 70-post blast that slammed the bill as full of “pork” spending and warning that anyone who voted for it should be ditched in the 2026 election.

Musk whipped up opposition to the bill all day, driving fury on MAGA media outlets, before Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance issued a late afternoon statement demanding a streamlined spending bill without Democratic deliverables. And exacerbating the pandemonium on Capitol Hill, they added another huge condition — for Congress to raise the government’s borrowing ceiling while Joe Biden is still president — a massive challenge at short notice.

It was not immediately clear how closely Trump and Musk were coordinating. But the timeline of Musk’s pressure and the president-elect’s belated entry into the public fray offered demoralized Democrats an opening. New York Rep. Dan Goldman conjured a scenario on X clearly calculated to get under the president-elect’s skin. “As the shadow Pres-Elect, Elon Musk is now calling the shots for House Rs on government funding while Trump hides in Mar-a-Lago behind his handlers,” Goldman wrote. “It increasingly seems like we’re in for 4 years of an unelected oligarch running the country by pulling on his puppet’s strings.”

Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN’s Manu Raju after speaking to the president-elect that Trump had been blindsided by Johnson. He said Trump is “not read into this … and he’s just learning about it … he’s just reading about it.”

The collapse of the stop-gap spending bill presented Johnson, Trump and Democrats with risky dilemmas.

As lawmakers left the Capitol Wednesday night with no certainty of what would happen next or when they’d be able to go home for the holidays, the country lurched into the first crisis of the second Trump era.

Outgoing Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell summed up the commotion with a prediction for 2025.

“Oh, this is the way it’s going to be next year,” he told his GOP colleague, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, as they passed in a Senate corridor.

The size of Johnson’s bill sparked uproar on conservative media. MAGA pundits were especially outraged that lawmakers awarded themselves a pay rise in the measure, weeks after an election that partly turned on inflation.

Trump supporters pose this question: After Republicans won in 2024 on a promise to gut the federal government and slash budgets, why would they make their first act since Trump’s triumph a classic year-end spending spree?

“I’ve been a ‘no’ on it a long time,” GOP Rep. Tim Burchett told CNN’s Jim Acosta. The Tennessee lawmaker added: “President Trump ran on changing things. I say if we’re going to pass something, pass it about three days into the next Congress and hand it over to Trump and let him handle it.”

But many Republicans are worried about the political implications of a shutdown. And assuming they want a way out, any new bill must recognize current realities. Democrats — for a couple weeks more — control the Senate so they must be given some incentive to cooperate. And the GOP speaker will need Democratic votes in the House owing to his tiny majority and the reluctance of some on his side to back any spending.

Johnson said he’d tried to sell his bill to Musk and his fellow co-chair of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, on a text chain. Explaining the “conservative play call” behind his plan, he said on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning, “Instead of doing, you know, (Democratic Senate Majority Leader) Chuck Schumer, Biden spending for 2025, we push this decision into March.” He went on: “So, the feature there is that we’ll have Republican-controlled Congress and Trump back in the White House and we get to decide spending for 2025.”

But all Johnson has succeeded in doing is putting his own job in jeopardy.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie told CNN’s Raju that the speaker wouldn’t get his vote in the next Congress, adding that “it would take a Christmas miracle” for him to change his mind. And Bryan Lanza, who served as a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that a number of lawmakers were of the same mind. “The speaker doesn’t have the votes right now. He would need to be saved by Donald Trump,” Lanza said.

But if Johnson is in danger — only days after appearing at the Army v. Navy game in a show of unity with Trump and Musk on Saturday — his fate could complicate Trump’s big inauguration party next year.

Republicans are desperate for a fast start to make the most of the apex of Trump’s power. A bruising election for speaker — like the 15 rounds it took to choose short-lived Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 — would be counterproductive.

And if Johnson, who was himself a last-ditch compromise from the backbenches, can’t get elected speaker, who can?

In one of his posts on X, Musk suggested that the best path for Republicans would be to freeze Washington until Trump takes office. “No bills should be passed (by) Congress until Jan 20,” he wrote. That would create a government shutdown that would last for weeks, saddle the president-elect with a massive crisis as soon as he takes office and cause considerable economic damage. And the Republican House majority will be even smaller to start Trump’s term than it is now, making it even more difficult to pass anything.

Musk’s sabotaging of the Johnson stop-gap spending measure gave Democrats an early chance to land a blow on the coming Trump presidency.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries raised the plight of Americans who would be harmed by a government shutdown. “We reached a bipartisan agreement to meet the needs of the American people and provide assistance to farmers, families, children, seniors, veterans, men and women in uniform and working-class Americans,” the New York Democrat said. “House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt everyday Americans all across this country.”

House Democrats will meet Thursday morning to discuss next steps. But Jeffries’ statement suggests they will stand firm and demand Trump back down.

Politically, there is little incentive for them to help extricate Johnson and the president-elect from their corner. After all, Trump demanded they cooperate in passing a stripped-down bill without any of their priorities. And his order to raise the debt ceiling, which is expected to be reached in his second term, is a transparent attempt to place the political blowback for such a step on the current president before he leaves office and to spare himself. In fact, Trump said so himself: “Increasing the debt limit is not great, but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”

Republicans have historically made lifting the government’s borrowing limit painful for Democratic presidents — several times driving the country close to a disastrous debt default. So why should Democrats help now?

The White House said it was up to Republicans to sort out the mess in the House. But there’s no obvious path to do that, meaning Washington is clouded in uncertainty ahead of the holiday season.

North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer told Raju he was frustrated that Trump had not made his bottom lines clearer sooner. And asked whether it was possible to raise the debt ceiling in only two days, he was doubtful.

“But, you know, it’s almost Christmas, it’s amazing what people might do to get home.”