Partners In Chaos, Partners In Dysfunction, Partners In Disaster
In an interview for The Guardian, historian Timothy Snyder told Martin Pengelly that Trump loyalists should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on Señor T. “Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money. And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man.
“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”
…Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “DOGE,” a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending.
Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans— an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund— Snyder said: “All the threats that Trump is now going to issue— ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’— Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.
“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money… and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
…“So I thought about this dependency position,” Snyder said. “I was going to call it Muskotrumpovia, because I think Musk is a more important person, but Trumpomuskovia had a nicer ring to it.
“And also, I wanted Muskovia because I wanted the idea of Russia to be there in the background, because a lot of smart Russia hands are saying this all the time: this is kind of like the 1990s in Russia. You have the doddering, rich-but-not-very-rich president [Boris Yeltsin], surrounded by more youthful, more active, ambitious oligarchs. That’s the kind of scenario [America is] in.”
Musk is serious about cutting the budget— by a trillion minimum, two trillion if he can. Trump has made solid promises to his base that he will never “touch” some of the areas Musk wants to defund. And if history is any indication— Trump was the biggest-spending peacetime president ever— Trump fully intends to break the bank again, putting him at loggerheads with Musk, who will want to rein him in. The clash, when it comes, won’t just be about numbers but about ego, leverage, and control. Musk doesn’t back down from fights, and Trump doesn’t like to be told no— especially not by someone richer, younger, and, in Trump’s eyes, more threatening to his image of dominance.
As Snyder hinted, America is staring down its own version of a palace intrigue drama, complete with entitled billionaires, loyalists, and would-be kingmakers vying for influence over a president who thrives on chaos but who is increasingly challenged cognitively. The result could make governance an afterthought, with Musk steering economic policy in ways that may gut social programs and Trump undermining efforts to curb spending when it suits his political ambitions. The question is whether Musk’s drive to dismantle government spending will clash so intensely with Trump’s addiction to spectacle and debt that their alliance collapses— leaving a fractured administration that’s both ungovernable and deeply beholden to oligarchic power.
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