For almost a decade, conservatives have insisted that we should take Donald Trump seriously, not literally. But how seriously should we take Elon Musk?
Musk, who funnelled more than two hundred and seventy million dollars into Trump’s Presidential campaign, has become somewhat ubiquitous in the weeks since the election: co-chairing a budget-cutting advisory commission called DOGE, touring Congress, and vociferously supporting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, in Germany. Questioned about that last one—about his support for a party whose manifesto reads, in part, “Islam does not belong in Germany”—Musk replied, “The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office!” Was that literal? Serious or deliberately trolling? Sincere but underinformed?
This week, it has been the turn of conservatives to try to gauge Musk’s meaning and intent. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson had just about finalized a short-term agreement on government spending with the Democrats, who, until Inauguration Day, still run the White House. The idea was to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown and to insure that all the bills were paid through March, when Republicans would be back in charge. And, for the sake of political tranquility, Johnson made some minor concessions to the Democrats and attached a couple of bills with bipartisan support. But, on Wednesday, Musk unleashed a torrent of more than a hundred and fifty posts on X, the social-media platform he owns, denouncing the agreement, which had the effect of making it the main subject of the world. “Outrageous!” Musk wrote, retweeting a self-styled “Former Jan 6th Political Prisoner” who said the bill would allow Congress to block an investigation into the January 6th House select committee. “Unconscionable,” he wrote, about a claim that the stopgap spending bill would raise congressional pay by forty per cent. (The real figure was 3.8 per cent.) Many of the tweets took this form—a word of outrage, a furious emoji, regarding claims about the bill’s overreach or sheer length. But within a few hours the effect was clear. Republican congressmen started to reply to Musk on X, saying that he had persuaded them to turn against the bill. Not long after that, Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance released a joint statement with Trump denouncing the continuing resolution, which effectively killed it, and instead pushed for a “temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS.” The statement also said that Congress should raise the debt ceiling, something that Musk hadn’t mentioned. Then both Trump and Musk threatened representatives who opposed them with primary challenges—a suggestion, maybe, of how this kind of wealth in politics could change things, even just by being invoked.
What exactly was going on here? The first gloss, offered by the Democrats, was that this had been a power play on the part of the Tesla boss, who has an ambiguous structural role in Trump’s administrative coalition but a pivotal and symbolic one. In their press releases, Democrats started to refer to “President Musk,” as if Trump were not really in charge. But this didn’t quite seem right, since Trump’s continued calls for Congress to lift the debt ceiling—a change that would end the routine brinkmanship over government shutdowns that the House G.O.P. now stages—signalled a different agenda from that of Musk and his allies. “DOGE is focused on reducing spending and Trump seeks to lift one of the few procedural mechanisms that has a reliable track record of compelling lawmakers to pare back federal spending,” Noah Rothman, of the National Review, observed. On Thursday, Johnson hastily put together a new bill (Plan B, as it came to be known) with both Trump and Musk’s support. Plan B both radically pared down the size of the bill, seemingly appeasing Musk, while promising a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling, appeasing Trump. The debt-ceiling provision seemed to arouse the opposition of some hard-line conservatives. “We are either fiscally conservative or not,” the libertarian senator Rand Paul said, urging opposition. Thirty-eight Republicans voted against Plan B, and it died, too.
There was a hint here of what remains unresolved in the Trump coalition. For almost a decade, Trump and his allies have sought to organize it as a populist complaint against liberals and against élites. In 2024, that worked, but the coalition that powered Trump’s victory drew heavily from those less engaged in politics and who ranged, ideologically, from doctrinaire social conservatives, such as Vance, to contrarian ex-liberals, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Shortly after the election, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, an early but now ambivalent Trump supporter who is close with Musk, described this cadre, in an interview with the Free Press:
The left, the Democratic Party—it’s like the Empire. They’re all
imperial stormtroopers, And we’re the ragtag Rebel Alliance, and it’s
an uncomfortably diverse, heterogenous group. You have, I don’t know,
a teen-age Chewbecca and Princess Leia-type character. Then we have an
autistic C-3PO policy-wonk person. It’s a ragtag Rebel Alliance
against the Empire.
More Chewbaccas than Leias, maybe. But Musk’s sudden rise and the deference that Republicans have accorded him suggest something about how uncertain, and up for grabs, the Trump agenda is. Steve Bannon, Trump’s original political guru, told Semafor this week that he was “for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes. We have got to increase taxes on the wealthy.” Though it may be hard to imagine that becoming a mainstream G.O.P. position anytime soon, it’s little easier to see the potential for some variability in the Party’s posture toward China, given that many conservatives have spent years warning of the mounting threat of the Chinese Communist Party, with whom Musk’s Tesla has crucial business relations. Are high tariffs really so certain? It might be easier to say if it were clear what Musk is most interested in—a sustained role in politics for himself, a libertarian turn for the country, or just to be proved right? It may be that Musk soon tires of politics, or politics tires of him. But this week his power seemed to be growing, and Musk appeared to be leaning in.
Although the shape of the Trump Administration remains murky, the past few days have perhaps clarified what we will spend the coming months arguing about. Money—wealth and poverty—is in the air. As the House Republicans perseverated over the continuing resolution, Luigi Mangione, charged with the murder of a health-insurance executive, was returned to New York to be arraigned, led on a perp walk in an orange jumpsuit. The same week that the Amazon C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, dined with Trump and Musk at Mar-a-Lago (“Everybody wants to be my friend,” the President-elect said, in a press conference this week), the Teamsters organized a strike at seven of the company’s hubs, just before Christmas. A billionaire is in the White House, claiming to have the interests of the working class at heart, with the world’s richest man and his plentiful conflicts of interest operating alongside him. Democrats may be a party in crisis, but they should know how to fight this.
On Friday, the crisis over the continuing resolution suddenly abated. By midday, Johnson had a new gambit, Plan C, in which government spending would be extended three months with some of the extraneous elements of the bill stripped out, and without the change to the debt ceiling that Trump and Vance had wanted. Reporters waited in a chilly Capitol for the Speaker to reveal whether they could go home for the holidays (“The Rotunda is 10 degrees colder than anywhere else in Washington,” the veteran Hill scribe John Bresnahan groused); the news was good, and they could leave. What had been accomplished, for all this drama? A few tiny, temporary cuts to programs, and the introduction of a potential new center of power in Washington. Johnson survived as Speaker, for now. Once the votes had been cast, Musk wrote on X, “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances.” But the Tesla billionaire didn’t mention that the main circumstance had been himself. ♦
