Team Trump is scrambling to control the fallout from Elon Musk almost singlehandedly terminating a stopgap spending bill that would have ensured the federal government is funded through March 14. The problem is twofold. One is that the government may soon shutter, leaving House Speaker Mike Johnson with essentially no exit from the debacle. The other is that Musk is starting to eclipse President-elect Donald Trump.
Instead of Trump heading into his second term as Mr. Big, it increasingly looks like Musk is calling the shots. “This bill should not pass,” Musk declared. It didn’t. The result is political mayhem. Sen. Rand Paul is suggesting that Musk should replace Johnson as House speaker. So is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Writing in Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall observed, “Musk is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial. He introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control. See it clearly: Musk did this. Trump thrives on chaos, but his chaos. Not someone else’s chaos.”
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has essentially been AWOL over the past several weeks. It appears that Musk has cemented the bromance between himself and Trump. He’s everywhere. He goes to the Notre Dame with Trump. He goes to the Army-Navy game with Trump. He goes to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The only question is where he does not go.
Now Trump is moving to quash the notion that’s in some kind of co-presidency with Musk, a notion that Gerald Ford once proposed to Ronald Reagan in 1980 who promptly rejected the notion. Instead, the Trump campaign released a statement to Business Insider claiming that Trump remains in command: “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view,” Leavitt told it. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
But the more the Trump campaign feels compelled to deny the claim, the more plausible it will become. For their part, Democrats are playing up the idea that Musk is the true president-elect. Rep. Rosa DeLauro issued a fact sheet showing what Elon’s move to kill disaster supplemental aid will cost each state. Others are referring to “President-elect Musk.” “He’s president and Trump is now vice president,” stated Rep. Jim McGovern.
Musk himself says that he is simply an upstanding patriot who seeks to bring important matters to the incoming administration’s attention.
For Trump, who has vowed to upend the federal government, torpedoing the bill offered an opportunity to flex his political muscles even before he officially becomes president. President Joe Biden is nowhere in sight. Trump dominates.
But in dominating the debate, he risks taking responsibility for a government shutdown, one largely engineered by his buddy Musk. At some point, there may be a collision between Trump and Musk. After all, if the shutdown isn’t resolved by January 6, Congress won’t be able to certify his election as president.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.
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