Brandon Bell/Pool via AP
President-elect Donald Trump walks with Elon Musk before the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket, November 19, 2024, in Boca Chica, Texas.
As I write, the latest from the smoking crater that is the House of Representatives is that they will hold votes on discrete pieces of a government funding package—a vote on a continuing resolution to mid-March, one on disaster relief, and one on agriculture funding. An extension to the debt ceiling has dropped out of the deal, because too many Republicans rejected moving forward on it.
As my colleague David Dayen explains, Congress was on track to handle government funding with relative ease until Elon Musk, concerned about his business interests in China, derailed it with a series of tweets that prompted Trump to belatedly follow Musk’s lead.
The Musk-Trump caper humiliated House Speaker Mike Johnson, left Democrats to revel in Republican disarray, and detracted from the perception of an all-powerful president-elect. Instead, Trump looked more like an errand boy for Musk than vice versa.
The debacle also served as a wake-up call to congressional Republicans. They can either play the role of total ciphers and just do everything Trump and Musk ask, or they can recover some of their power as an independent branch of government.
The 38 Republicans who voted to kill the Trump substitute have so far decided not to be total Musk-Trump lackeys, and Johnson is now moving in their direction by deleting the debt ceiling measure. To be clear, this will probably work out the way Musk wanted, with no restrictions on U.S. investment in China in the deal. But he and Trump were defied on their initial offer, and Trump himself has had to reckon with the reality that he has a fox in his henhouse. A fox with a bigger social media website than his.
Speaking of foxes, Fox News, a mainstay of pro-Trump propaganda, has been far from friendly to the Musk-Trump ploy. An extensive piece on the Fox website quotes Democrat after Democrat scoring political points and getting under Trump’s skin with the observation that Musk more than Trump is in the role of president. Fox quotes progressive leader Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), in a tweet on Musk’s X site no less: “Apparently America elected Elon Musk President. Trump is just his errand boy.”
Trump is plainly fascinated by Musk. Unlike Trump, who made his fortune in sleazy real estate deals, Musk, for all his weirdness, is a genuine entrepreneur and inventor. He has all but taken over NASA with his SpaceX venture. His Starlink network of 4,000 satellites includes battlefield communication services to Ukraine, a function that Musk has also used to be a foreign-policy player. Musk launched the first successful new car company in a century, working with engineers to solve daunting technical challenges. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, rebranded as X, which was on the verge of failing, has made him even richer and more influential.
Musk, who spent a reported $130 million to help get Trump elected, gains immensely from his partnership with Trump. In the two weeks after Trump’s election victory, Tesla’s stock price went from $251.50 to $320.72, making Musk richer by some $50 billion. Musk can count on Trump to kill consumer rebates for EVs that his competitors to Tesla rely on more than he does, cementing his dominance of the EV market. The Trump administration is in a position to use tariffs to limit competition from Chinese exports of e-vehicles, and to lock in and expand Musk’s valuable contracts with the Pentagon and NASA.
But at some point, Trump has to realize that Musk will not be constrained, and that allowing him to be a loose cannon will backfire on Trump. Ultimately, Trump and Musk are two scorpions in a bottle. There is room for only one.
Yet, for once, Trump can’t simply tell Musk as he has done with so many others, “You’re fired!” If Musk should become Trump’s enemy, Musk could do Trump substantial harm.
There is no historical case of an aspiring dictator giving this much power to a seeming ally who has independent sources of influence, and then realizing that he has a tiger by the tail. As outsiders, Democrats can only hope this fraught brotherhood of narcissists does maximum damage to Trump—and work to limit the damage to the country.
