The Elon Musk Factor shouldn’t be underestimated in Trump’s second term

There has never been a partnership like the world’s most powerful and world’s richest man seemingly attached at the hip, neither of whom can be intimidated by anyone, under any circumstances, and whom the establishment has absolutely no power or control over.

 

I’ll admit:  The sight of the world’s most powerful and world’s richest man seemingly attached at the hip is more than a little unusual.  While I don’t claim to know every detail of every President’s personal relationships, I cannot recall any similar instance of such a dynamic duo.  In the past, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Presidents enlisted the aid of the Morgans and Rockefellers to stave off financial collapse from time to time, but Teddy Roosevelt, for example, didn’t appoint John D. Rockefeller as one of his top advisors, much less pose for pictures with his family after he won in 1904 or join him when the business tycoon opened up a new oil refinery.  To me at least, the alliance between President Donald Trump and mega-billionaire Elon Musk is something almost entirely new in the history of American politics.

If anything, the relationship and the closeness of the bond is even more interesting because Mr. Musk was briefly a member of two advisory councils during the President’s first term, only to step down within six months over a policy dispute when the United States was pulled out of the Paris Accords, which were supposedly to fight climate change.  “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” he wrote on X, then Twitter, on June 1, 2017.  “I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS, through others in WH & via councils, that we remain,” he had said a day earlier.  Not surprisingly, Mr. Musk was under intense pressure from the start to refuse to participate in anything Trump-related given the resistance had already begun waging a war that would ultimately backfire against them.  A start up investor even ran some $400,000 in ads in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, urging him to “dump Trump.”  That was then, this is now, as they say and the two have formed a much closer working relationship and personal bond throughout the crucible of the campaign this time around.  While it has rarely been mentioned, Mr. Musk risked perhaps more than anyone except for Donald Trump himself by backing the dark horse candidate, maligned by the establishment and frequently depicted as Hitler reborn.  Ever since he purchased Twitter in October of 2022 in a dramatic move positioned as a defense of free speech, Mr. Musk has found himself on the receiving end of a media and government onslaught.  While the media claimed he opened the “gates of hell” by reducing restrictions on allowable speech, ridiculously insisting Twitter itself would shut down, the Security and Exchange Commission pursued an investigation into the vague “matter of certain purchases, sales, and disclosures of Twitter shares,” an investigation that was reopened just this week.  According to Mr. Musk’s legal team, the SEC has been demanding a settlement, probing his other companies, and conducting  “a multi-year investigation” following more than “six years of harassment.”  There are also reports that the Biden-Harris Administration punitively restricted his Starlink satellite internet service from participating in infrastructure spending on rural broadband, and steered contacts from Space-X to Boeing to the point where they were willing to risk leaving astronauts stranded at the International Space Station, and even once they were stranded, refused to ask Mr. Musk for help despite having much more proven technology.  To me at least, it seems obvious that backing President Trump financially and vociferously would have redounded to his great detriment had he lost, greatly reducing his fortune if not actually having had his companies taken away from him.

Of course, President Trump prevailed and almost immediately gave Mr. Musk and his counterpart, Vivek Ramaswamy, an even more challenging and important task in his second administration – reducing the size of the government to solve the debt crisis.  Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are co-leading the Department of Government Efficiency to that end, colloquially known as DOGE, an advisory board charged with evaluating every aspect of government spending, organization, and personnel, and making recommendations to reduce spending by up to $2 trillion per year, a monumental task and a staggering figure.  “We’re looking to save maybe $2 trillion, and it’ll have no impact — actually it’ll make life better — but it’ll have no impact on people,” President Trump told reporters recently. “We will never cut Social Security,” he added.  According to Politico, “The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is going to solve the U.S.’s debt problem. It’s going to dramatically reduce the government’s power and slash the size of its workforce. And it’s going to crack down on that perpetual, easily named enemy: waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.”  Not surprisingly, the DC-based publication was highly skeptical, continuing, “those are completely different objectives that can be in conflict. Each poses its own political and legal obstacles. It’s not clear how — or if — DOGE intends to pick its battles.”  While acknowledging that Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy might be able to accomplish something around empty office space, outdated systems, and improper payments totaling some $247 billion in 2022 alone, “there’s comparatively less value for these two un-elected business guys to answer foundational questions about what we as a society should value. They’ve talked about balancing the budget. But doing that would require building consensus on broad tax and spending priorities — a completely separate undertaking. After all, the government does not exist to be efficient. It should seek efficiency as a means to achieve its goals. And it’s unclear why Musk and Ramaswamy are qualified to set those goals.”  In the meantime, Politico seemed to take issue with Mr. Musk’s “hardball approach,” referring to him as the “first buddy” and citing his pressure on Republicans, insisting they will not survive a primary if they oppose President Trump’s agenda.  Ultimately, they concluded, “It’s easy for Republicans to be enthusiastic about a vague idea. It’s much harder to build support for a specific plan,” especially after a similar effort in the 1980s, known as the Grace Commission, “which was the same basic idea — a private-sector advisory group designed to look at ways to make government work better,” but “none of that body’s suggestions were actually adopted, despite a mandate from then-President Ronald Reagan.”

While some skepticism is certainly warranted, Mr. Musk is not a man known for failure of any kind.  At 53 years of old, he has already revolutionized online payments, the car industry, space travel, and satellite broadband.  He is nothing if not relentless to the point of pathological, and he has put his personal reputation and prestige on the line with this effort.  If he succeeds, he will go down in history for having accomplished what no one has since then-Senator Harry Truman led the War Advisory Board in the early days of World War II.  If he fails, he will become a cautionary tale, if not a subject of outright ridicule.  Whatever the future may hold, it certainly seems to me that Mr. Musk (and Mr. Ramaswamy) will do everything in their considerable power to make it the former rather than the latter, and in that regard the world was privileged to witness just a small taste of what this might look like on Wednesday, when it appeared Mr. Musk, Mr. Ramaswamy, and ultimately President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance killed a typical monstrosity of a spending bill in less than 24 hours even if the result is a dreaded government shutdown.  This story began with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson doing the completely inexplicable, somehow believing he could negotiate an over 1,500 page budget bill, technically a “continuing resolution”, in secret with Democrats right before the holidays, pad an already bloated budget with such “niceties” as a 40% pay raise for a Congress with an approval rating slightly higher than lung cancer, along with a grab bag of funding from disaster relief to bridges, and then pass it immediately without question under threat of a government shutdown.  Sadly, this has become something of the norm in Congress – none other than Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders threatened a filibuster on New Year’s Eve in 2020 over a similar practice – but this time around, everyone was about to learn there’s nothing normal about Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Before the sun had risen on Wednesday morning, Mr. Musk took aim at the bill, writing “This bill should not pass” on X and then following it up with around 70 other posts slamming it for being full of “pork” and repeating his primary threats.  Mr. Ramaswamy chimed in, leading to a social media wave of opposition that culminated later in the day when Vice President-elect Vance issued a formal statement from the incoming administration.  President Trump himself railed against the bill himself shortly thereafter and by close of business, the deal was almost certainly dead and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s job was at risk.  

Needless to say, the mainstream media was flummoxed and Democrats were outraged.  CNN’s Stephen Collinson was downright tame when he claimed, “Trump and Musk unleash a new kind of chaos on Washington.”  “Welcome to the new Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” he began, “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.”  He continued, “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.”  Later in the same article, he decried “Musk-style governance” as if the same complaint hadn’t been made about Donald Trump and over again, “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.”  Incredibly, Mr. Collinson believes Democrats trying to slip through a massive pay raise for themselves have an opening.  In this regard, he cited New York Representative Dan Goldman as an example of the farcical idea that Donald Trump isn’t really running the show, is being intimidated by Mr. Musk, if not that Mr. Musk is pulling the strings, and has an opportunity “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,” Representative Goldman wrote on X. “It increasingly seems like we’re in for 4 years of an unelected oligarch running the country by pulling on his puppet’s strings.”

Of course, left completely out of the discussion is why Congress remains so dysfunctional that it creates constant crises and cannot perform basic job functions.  Even beyond the basics, almost everyone believes our $35 trillion and growing national debt is unsustainable, and yet neither the mainstream media nor Democrats ever think it’s an appropriate time to address it, taking advantage of every self-inflicted crisis to increase spending and pad their own pockets.  Opposition to this madness is always considered shocking chaos on Capitol Hill, but now there are two figures in Washington, President Trump and Mr. Musk, that thrive on chaos, have no compunction about unleashing a torrent of it upon any that oppose them, and are both uniquely and completely intimidated by any of the supposed powers that be, either in government or the broader establishment.  Indeed, much of the fury seems to be a reflection of the critics’ own insecurities more than anything else.  They are ranting because they know there has never been a partnership like these two, one that cannot be intimidated by anyone, under any circumstances, and whom they have absolutely no power or control over.  Quite simply, they are terrified that the combination amounts to an unstoppable force and I can’t really blame them.  They’re going to be stuck dealing with perhaps the two craziest bastards on planet Earth for the next four years, a pair that makes Teddy Roosevelt in his prime seem tame, and an alliance only President Trump himself could possibly have forged.  Indeed, even as I was writing this post, before I had finished, a new deal was announced that stripped out much of the nonsense and lifted the debt ceiling for more than two years.  Though the initial attempt to pass the bill with a two thirds majority failed and the future remains uncertain, the prior 1,500 page monstrosity has been cut down to a tenth the size and out of chaos, will come order.  As Mr. Musk himself has noted, “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat,” but I fear Washington simply isn’t ready and perhaps never will be.