When Will Most Americans Be Sick Enough Of Elon Musk To Nationalize His Companies And Deport Him?

Trump and Musk aren’t just competing for attention… and, as Trump mentioned last week, Musk isn’t eligible to become president because he was born in South Africa. They’re competing over policy and strategy and, ultimately, dominance (and submission). Musk spent at least $277 million buying the election for the Republicans. And he wants a reasonable ROI— not some ideological bullcrap from Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer.

Judd Legum gets it. And so does Benjamin Wallace-Wells who wrote yesterday about the Republicans’ Musk problem. Keep in mind as you read what he wrote that Musk has already announced that he plans to move the Democratic Party in an even more corporate direction by financing primaries against progressives to elect more New Dems and Blue Dogs.

For his money, the Republicans have watched Musk become “ubiquitous… 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 Twitter, 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 Twitter, 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—va 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 GOP now stages— signaled 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 RFK 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 GOP 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 CEO, 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 Twitter, “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances.” But the Tesla billionaire didn’t mention that the main circumstance had been himself.

So far, Trump is taking Musk’s side on everything. We’ll see how long that remains tenable. Musk is a national security risk and the living, breathing definition of ultimate corruption, despite Chris Sununu’s asslicking bullshit. The richest people are always the most corrupt. Not 99% of the time— always. And if you’re unaware of that, you don’t know any rich people.

In short, Sununu’s idiocy that Musk’s immense wealth makes him immune to conflicts of interest is deeply flawed because it fundamentally— and intentionally— misunderstands how wealth and power operate. Being extraordinarily wealthy does not eliminate the desire to accumulate more wealth or to consolidate influence. If anything, billionaires like Musk expand their fortunes and power by leveraging government connections and contracts. Musk’s companies have repeatedly benefited from federal subsidies, grants, and contracts— proving that even the wealthiest individuals continue to pursue financial opportunities tied to government spending. Musk’s existing reliance on billions in government contracts undermines Sununu’s claim that he is “above” financial motivations. Instead, it highlights precisely why Musk’s role as head of a government agency overseeing spending and cost-cutting presents a massive and obvious conflict of interest.

Moreover, Sununu’s dismissal of concerns about Musk’s potential to abuse power ignores how those with influence and privilege perpetuate their power. Wealthy individuals use their positions to shape government policies in ways that benefit themselves, whether through direct subsidies, regulatory decisions, or tax breaks. Musk’s ability to exploit loopholes or advance policies favoring his businesses, even indirectly, cannot be overlooked simply because of his net worth. Sununu’s argument sidesteps the broader implications of Musk’s appointment, particularly as it coincides with proposals to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare— programs that working-class Americans depend on but billionaires like Musk have no personal stake in protecting. Instead of addressing these legitimate concerns, Sununu waves them away with the naïve assumption that extreme wealth equates to altruism, ignoring historical examples of billionaires prioritizing self-interest under the guise of public service.