Elon Musk has spent the week derailing a bipartisan funding bill, sending the U.S. government hurtling toward a shutdown. But on Friday, the tech billionaire broadened his scope from domestic to international politics with a ringing endorsement of Alternative for Germany, the country’s far-right political party.
Early Friday morning on his social media platform, X, Musk posted, “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
The AfD is an ethnonationalist party that has faced criticism for its ties to neo-Nazis and, per the BBC, considers immigrants “not ‘properly German,’” regardless of citizenship status. The party has gained traction in recent years, with Vox’s Li Zhou writing that AfD support is based on a vision of Germany “that’s white, that relies on fossil fuels, that’s hostile toward more immigrants, and that’s adopted many of the same anti-LGBTQ positions that are common among conservatives in the US.”
Musk’s endorsement, which comes with a February election on the horizon in Germany, has been celebrated by the AfD, its members, and leadership—but slammed by many others. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said of Musk’s post: “We have freedom of opinion—it also goes for multibillionaires, but freedom of opinion also means that you can say things that aren’t right and don’t contain good political advice.”
In the U.S., observers have railed against the endorsement, with conservative commentator Bill Kristol writing, “I think this should be kind of a big deal.… The AfD is Germany’s neo-Nazi party,” and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeting examples of AfD officials’ hateful actions and remarks, writing, “The AfD’s mission is to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi movement.”
Over the past year or so, Musk has gradually aligned himself with the AfD.
In October 2023, he quote-tweeted a post from a far-right German X account that supported the AfD stopping search and rescues of asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean, which the user said facilitated “European suicide.” “Is the German public aware of this?” Musk wrote, but, amid backlash, later posted, “I have not ‘supported’ any political party and don’t know AFD from a hole in the ground.”
In June, Musk expressed curiosity about the party in a reply to Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old far-right German political activist known as the “anti-Greta.” “Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?” Musk wrote. “They keep saying ‘far right’, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.” Musk’s Friday endorsement came in a response to Seibt on X.
The world’s richest man has occasionally dipped his toes into European politics, with a major through line in his forays being opposition to immigration. Musk himself is an immigrant from South Africa.
Unfortunately More on Elon:
Senator Kyrsten Sinema, former Democrat and current party thorn, made her feelings known in an “exit interview” with Semafor.
The Arizona senator, who is perhaps best known for opposing key Democratic policies, along with her DINO collaborator Senator Joe Manchin, reflected on her time in office—revealing little regret.
On her recent decision to vote with Manchin to block President Biden’s reappointment of a top labor board nominee, she simply stated, “Don’t give a shit.”
She showed little remorse for other major decisions, like going against Democrats in 2022 to oppose filibuster reform, calling it the “most important decision I’ve ever made in my life.”
“I know some people think I’m, like, this enigma or whatever, but I don’t think that’s true at all,” Sinema said. “I think, maybe, this is a place where sometimes people say things that they don’t mean. I am not one of those people.… I think I’m highly predictable.” She then refused to say who she voted for.
“Honestly, I feel like we got 40 years’ worth of work done in one term,” she continued. “I do wish we had gotten immigration done. We tried really hard, but everything else was just pretty freaking amazing.”
Again, this from the woman who was often absent from key Democratic votes to go run in an Ironman or work at some winery. She noted that she (thankfully) is done running for public office. We’ll see what kind of chaos she can cause next in the consulting and lobbying world.
A month out from Biden’s transfer of power to Trump, the president used his power to announce a massive new round of student loan forgiveness for public service workers. The news comes as Republicans in Congress are still scrambling to avert a government shutdown.
The Biden administration Friday morning said it would cancel $4.28 billion in student loans for 55,000 teachers, nurses, service members, law enforcement officials, and other public servants. The relief brings the total of student debt forgiveness under Biden to nearly $180 billion for nearly five million people, according to a Department of Education statement.
The cancellations will be through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, or PSLF, which forgives public service workers’ remaining federal student loan balance after 10 years of payments. In recent years, the Biden administration has taken steps to reform and improve access to the program, which had long been plagued by mismanagement.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement praised the administration’s newly announced relief and broader success revamping PSLF, saying, “Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered.”
A White House statement from President Biden said, “Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt.”
As Biden’s efforts to enact sweeping student forgiveness have largely been mired or dashed by Republican-led legal challenges, the administration has since pivoted to a revised “Plan B,” which targets specific groups of borrowers. The incoming Trump administration is expected to take a hostile stance toward student debt forgiveness.
Trump and the rest of the GOP seem to be even more at odds over the debt ceiling than initially believed.
“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous debt ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social in the early hours of Friday morning. “Remember, the pressure is on whoever is president.”
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!” he continued in another post.
This is bad news for the party of “fiscal responsibility.” Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, telling NBC News that it would be the “smartest thing to do.”
“I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically.”
On Thursday evening, the House voted on a Trump-backed spending bill that included a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling. That more modest measure was rejected by a whopping 38 Republicans who voted against. The infighting is set to come to a head on Friday, as the government will shut down at midnight Saturday if an agreement is not reached. Perhaps Republicans aren’t as beholden to Trump and his budget wishes as we initially thought.
Elon Musk really hopes you don’t remember when he was cheering on a government shutdown … less than 48 hours ago.
Shortly after a new “clean” spending bill failed to pass the House Thursday night, Musk took to X to lament how this was all the Democrats’ fault.
“A super fair & simple bill was put to a vote and only 2 Democrats in Congress were in favor,” Musk wrote. “Therefore the responsibility for the shutdown rests squarely on the shoulders of @RepJeffries.”
“Shame on @RepJeffries for rejecting a fair & simple spending bill that is desperately needed by states suffering from hurricane damage,” he wrote in another post.
Musk conveniently did not mention that 38 Republicans also voted against the bill.
And on Wednesday, Musk was more than happy to stir up revolt among the GOP. Not only did he blast the original continuing resolution and threaten any Republican who supported it, but he even ranted about how the government actually ought to shutter, at least until Donald Trump enters office.
“We’ll be fine for 33 days,” wrote one X user, to which Musk replied an enthusiastic, “YES.”
“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk wrote in a separate post, which read like marching orders to the more sycophantic GOP members, some of whom began to fantasize about a Congress led by Musk himself. Yeah, it’s gotten that bad.
Musk’s major blow-up and Trump’s last-minute request to raise the debt ceiling sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to assemble a “clean” bill. By Wednesday evening, Musk’s toddler-like tantrum had gotten him exactly what he wanted: an impending government shutdown. Too bad that wasn’t what the actual president-elect, not the unelected billionaire, was hoping for.
Now Musk’s only hope is to cast blame on Democrats, who probably would’ve supported the original bipartisan bill.
Read about what Musk did:
Donald Trump is desperate to pretend his shoddy leadership isn’t about to cause a government shutdown.
A “clean” spending bill, which contained a Trump-requested provision to suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, failed to pass on the House floor Thursday evening, earning just 174 votes in favor and 235 against.
Trump tried to push the blame onto President Joe Biden, in a Truth Social post Friday.
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’” wrote the president-elect. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”
But it’s not clear that Republicans are interested in solving anything. Thirty-eight Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against the pared-down bill, and a good portion of those GOP lawmakers spent the preceding 36 hours cheering on a shutdown alongside Elon Musk, the billionaire trying to run Congress through threats to oust elected officials.
Now Trump’s not even really trying to avert a shutdown but simply hoping that no one will blame him for it.
Government funding is set to expire at midnight.
Read more about the shutdown:
Mike Johnson is about to be hoist by his own petard, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t coming to the rescue this time.
During a press conference Thursday with House Democratic leaders, Jeffries was asked whether his party would consider voting for Johnson to retain the speakership amid a Republican “revolt,” if the speaker were to put something “amiable” in his continuing resolution.
“No,” Jeffries answered flatly.
The House minority leader spoke harshly about Republicans’ antics, which upended the hefty bipartisan spending bill that would have funded the government until March.
“That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government, and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help,” Jeffries said.
CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju posted on X that sources in a closed-door meeting said that Jeffries and other top Democrats have been “conveying to their members that they are in no mood to bail out Speaker Johnson from the spending drama after Donald Trump’s late demands.”
Raju wrote that Johnson had yet to connect with Jeffries since the original spending bill collapsed, and that Johnson was seeking a way forward among GOP members, who don’t exactly seem to be in agreement.
Late Wednesday, almost 24 hours after the 1,547-page bill had been released and Republicans had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Trump finally responded to the bill, demanding that House Republicans find a way to raise the debt ceiling—or abolish it altogether, he said later.
Jeffries previously moved to save Johnson’s job when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to have him ousted in April, dismissing her motion to remove the Louisiana Republican as “pro-Putin Republican obstruction.”
While House Democrats sought to minimize the chaos eight months ago, their will to fight for the embattled Johnson to retain his gavel appears to have greatly diminished. And this time, Greene’s floated replacing Johnson with Elon Musk.
By Thursday evening, the image of a new “clean” continuing resolution began to emerge. This bill would suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, until January 2027, as Trump had requested. It would also give $110 billion in disaster aid and extend the farm bill, while cutting some other provisions, such as one promoting the sale of high-ethanol gasoline.
Read more about the bill:
House Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy has no intentions of backing down after Donald Trump personally singled him out in a threat to get with the program on the spending bill.
The president-elect cut through an unusually quiet day from him to directly attack the Republican representative, suggesting he could be primaried next if he doesn’t fall in line.
“The very unpopular ‘Congressman” from Texas, Chip Roy, is getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory—All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself. Republican obstructionists have to be done away with. The Democrats are using them, and we can’t let that happen,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “Weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics, and as to Making America Great Again.”
“Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent. By the way, how’s Bob Good doing?” he continued in another post, referencing the Republican representative from Virginia who Trump helped oust in the primaries. “I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won’t have a chance!”
Roy likely became Trump’s target of the day after being unsatisfied with how far the spending cuts went in the last spending bill. But despite Trump’s direct threat, Roy held his ground in a message directed to the president.
“My position is simple—I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it,” Roy wrote on X. “I’ve been negotiating to that end. No apologies. CC: @realDonaldTrump @SpeakerJohnson @SenJohnThune @freedomcaucus.”
Trump on Thursday suggested outright abolishing the country’s debt ceiling, something that clearly makes the conservative Roy uncomfortable. On Tuesday, Roy introduced the DOGE Act to further cut federal spending on nonmilitary programs.
“We’re working right now on how to actually cut spending, which is what the voters sent me to Washington to do. So that’s what we’re working on,” Roy told the media when asked about Trump’s threat.
More on the spending bill fight:
The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday, based on interviews with nearly 50 people knowledgeable of the operations of the Biden White House. The story details the extent to which the president’s age has posed an issue throughout his presidency, including from the very start, and the lengths to which aides went to conceal it.
President Biden, now 82, was 78 years old when he took office, and the Journal reports that administration officials began to notice signs of his age “in just the first few months of his term,” as he would grow “tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”
Those who met with the president were reportedly told that “exchanges should be short and focused.” Meetings were strategically scheduled and, sometimes, if Biden “was having an off day,” they were simply canceled. A former aide recalled a national security official saying, regarding one rescheduled meeting, “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”
The Journal reported that lawmakers, Cabinet members, and the public all seemed to have less face time with the president than in previous administrations and that senior advisers were “often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.” Namely, administration officials like Jake Sullivan, Steve Ricchetti, and Lael Brainard frequently functioned as intermediaries for the president.
House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith reportedly sought to reach Biden ahead of his withdrawal from Afghanistan “but couldn’t get on the phone with him.” Smith noted that he was more frequently in touch with Barack Obama when he was president, though he wasn’t then the House Armed Services chair. Representative Jim Hines, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, similarly told the Journal, “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior.”
As for Biden and his Cabinet members, the Journal reports that interactions “were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted.” One reportedly gave up on trying to request calls with him altogether “because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome.” The report reveals too that Biden struggled to “recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him” as he prepared for his interview with special counsel Robert Hur—who was investigating whether Biden mishandled classified material and in February determined that a jury would consider him “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
On the 2024 campaign trail, the report says, Biden’s team often vetted questions from event attendees in advance. Pollsters for the campaign were also seemingly kept at arm’s length: The Journal reports that “Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him,” as the president often seemed unaware of the ample polling showing he was trailing Trump.
Years of such incidents culminated in Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. President-elect Donald Trump will, like Biden, be 78 at his inauguration and 82 by the end of his term.
The Georgia appeals court’s decision to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the 2020 election interference case against Trump has launched the ongoing case into chaos. State officials must now find someone to fill her role, a process that could, at best, bring things to a screeching halt—or kill the case altogether.
The court announced Thursday that it had overturned a decision by Judge Scott McAfee allowing Willis to remain on the case after she faced accusations of having an improper relationship with Nathan Wade, her special prosecutor. McAfee said Willis could remain on the case if she cut ties with Wade.
Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants had appealed the ruling, and the Georgia appeals court decided that the “appearance of impropriety” was just too much. While the indictment would not be dismissed, Willis’s “disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” according to Thursday’s court filing.
The appeals court’s decision doesn’t just knock Willis out of the driver’s seat, though—it disqualifies her entire office from trying the case.
Willis’s office filed a notice Thursday afternoon indicating that it intends to appeal the court’s decision, which, if taken up, could move the case to Georgia’s Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, will be responsible for determining who will take up the task of prosecuting the president-elect and his co-defendants, Lawfare’s senior editor Anna Bower wrote on X. But she warned that’s easier said than done.
“Realistically, it will be quite difficult to find another prosecutor who would be willing to take on this case. *If* the appeals court decision is not overturned by the GA Supreme Court, this likely spells the end of the prosecution against Trump and others in Fulton County,” Bower wrote.
