World’s Greatest Innovator Can’t Build a Budget DealElon Musk and Donald Trump are learning that blowing up spending deals is easy, but replacing them is a lot harder.
Big, exploding-quesadilla type news from CNN this morning—Chili’s is baby back baby back baby back, baby:
So, you know. There’s some good news too. Happy Friday.
Destruction Agentsby Andrew Egger The chaotic government-funding boondoggle we all watched over the last 48 hours was an object lesson in what Donald Trump and Elon Musk can and can’t do in Congress. What they can do is blow deals up, with great efficiency and little effort. When House and Senate leadership tried to push through a bipartisan spending bill to keep the government open into next year, Musk quickly marshaled the opposition with a blizzard of objections: The bill was too big and spent too much money, it included too many “woke” priorities, it gave lawmakers a pay raise, rank-and-filers didn’t have enough time to read it, and so on. Lawmakers saw the writing on the wall and pulled the bill, and Musk spent hours spiking the football (“America is for you, the beloved people”) and reveling in the praise of his biggest online suckups:  But, you know, then they still had to pass a bill. And that turned out to be the hard part. When House leaders went back to the drawing board yesterday, they quickly hacked away much of the dead spending package, getting rid of many of the specific small-ball provisions, like the pay raise, that Musk had singled out for ridicule. (Gone, too, as Sam Stein notes on the site this morning, were a host of popular measures that had been linked to the initial bill, including $190 million to fund the fight against pediatric cancer. America is for you, the beloved people!) And the revised version included one big new sop to Donald Trump: a suspension of the debt ceiling until 2027. This was enough for Elon, who had the corpse of the old bill to parade around as a trophy of his own sudden congressional influence. It was enough for Trump, whose top priority was getting the debt ceiling out of the way. But it wasn’t enough, it turned out, for the fiscal hawks whose process objections to the first bill had been genuine. One day earlier, they and Musk had been in perfect agreement that it was outrageous to authorize a ton of new spending while making few cuts and giving Congress little time to figure out exactly what was in the bill. Musk himself might have been satisfied with the new version, but the hawks couldn’t help but notice that . . . it still authorized a ton of new spending while making few cuts and giving Congress little time to figure out exactly what was in it. That it vaporized the debt ceiling to boot made it harder, not easier, to swallow. Here was Rep. Chip Roy:
Roy had spearheaded House resistance to the first package, to Musk’s public praise. His opposition to the second package drew a different response. “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,” Trump fumed. “Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.”¹ But when it came to a vote, Roy was far from alone. Thirty-eight Republicans also voted down the Trump-endorsed plan, many on the same grounds. Trump had suffered the first embarrassing defeat of his second term—and he’s not even president yet. Who knows what comes next: Maybe the House will cobble together yet another package today that can squeak across the finish line. Early indications are that they will try something similar to last night, shunning the idea of going back to the bipartisan package that Musk and Trump loathed. Will they find success? Probably not. And if they don’t, the government will likely plunge into shutdown just in time for Trump’s inauguration. That’s what Trump, this morning, indicated he wants. “If there is going to be a shutdown of government,” he posted, “let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’” Either way, the moral is clear. Trump and Elon can blow up House deals. But in this fractured Congress, so can anybody. What they haven’t shown is that they’re particularly ready to make a deal that can pass or government work. Perhaps that’s the point. Puppet Presidentby William Kristol At midday yesterday, as debate raged about continuing resolutions and debt limits and a government shutdown, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, put out a statement. Her important but unnamed topic: Elon Musk. For the preceding twenty-four hours, Musk had been at the center of the Republican universe. It was he who was getting the credit, the blame, and above all the attention for his decisive role in killing the continuing resolution negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump, by contrast, had praised Johnson earlier in the week, and had been relatively silent as Musk wreaked his havoc. Trump only weighed in against the CR after the deed was done. It seemed, as Nick Catoggio of the Dispatch put it, to be “the first time since Trump took over the party that some other populist has managed to impose his will on it.” That perception couldn’t be allowed to stand, so Leavitt hurried to set the record straight. “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.” The lady doth protest too much, methinks. And in her protest I spy a ray of hope. As Catoggio writes, what’s striking is that Musk’s incitement of a grassroots rebellion against the CR “succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard.” Furthermore, “the obsequiousness that some members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader.” Catoggio sums up the implication of what we all saw:
This thought has undoubtedly occurred to Trump. And Musk is undoubtedly aware Trump’s had this thought. That’s why Musk hastened to post, “First of all, I’m not the author of this proposal. Credit to @realDonaldTrump, @JDVance & @SpeakerJohnson.” It’s why, overnight, Musk posted again, accusing Trump’s critics of trying to drive a wedge between him and the president-elect by giving him the title “President Musk.” The man doth protest too unconvincingly. So what lies ahead on this front? Can Musk co-exist with Trump? Does Trump try to clip Musk’s wings? Does Musk try to edge Trump aside even as Trump has the Oval Office? Can he? Out in the country, could DOGE gradually replace MAGA as the ascendant authoritarian movement? Could Musk run, as a Republican or as an independent, for president in 2028? He’s not a natural-born citizen. But why would he and his supporters let a phrase in a centuries-old document stand in his way? The will of the people is what matters. As Musk has tweeted more than once, Vox populi = Vox dei. Trump seems, judging from his 3:00 am tweets, to be staying awake nights. He should be. It’s his movement. Or, at least, it has been his movement. He’s Lenin. But Stalin loiters in the wings. Quick HitsWHAT’S THE DEBT CEILING FOR? Donald Trump reiterated overnight that he wants the debt ceiling totally out of the way for his second term: “Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.” Over the last few years, Trump has frequently supported the tactics of fiscal-hawk Republicans who were willing to risk the government defaulting on its bills to try to extract spending cuts. But as this week’s funding brouhaha highlighted, and his pronouncement makes clear, Trump and the hawks actually see the ceiling very differently. When deficit hawks like Rep. Chip Roy dig in their heels on extending the debt ceiling, it’s because they see the ceiling as a recurring alarm siren that the federal government has spent far beyond its means—a posture they’ve been consistent about for years. But when Trump supported recent rounds of default chicken, it was for a subtly different reason. Mitch McConnell was the Democrats’ “lapdog,” Trump fumed in 2022, because he was “refusing to use the Debt Ceiling as a negotiating tool.” And again in 2023: “REPUBLICANS SHOULD NOT MAKE A DEAL ON THE DEBT CEILING UNLESS THEY GET EVERYTHING THEY WANT (Including the ‘kitchen sink’).” Trump, in other words, wasn’t thinking particularly hard about the debt—he just saw the ceiling as a procedural tool for the opposition to twist the arm of the sitting president, because any default (and the serious economic consequences) would likely be blamed on that president. And this is why he now wants it out of the way altogether: He’s about to be president. NATIONALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! You’d think he might be too busy, what with running all the companies and issuing diktats on how our government should spend our money and all, but Elon Musk manages to find the time to weigh in on foreign affairs too. For instance, here he was last night endorsing Germany’s extreme-right fringe political party, Alternative für Deutschland: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” AfD’s big political planks include cracking down on immigration and doing away with Germany’s “really sorry about all that” national posture toward Holocaust remembrance. Nationalism, recall, is when you stick up for other crypto-racists all around the world. Cheap Shots
1 It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s criticism of Roy is incoherent on the merits, suggesting Roy had supported the original spending bill when he had very publicly opposed it. These things can happen when you’re trying to pretend you have principled reasons for attacking a person, when in reality you’re just mad they won’t do what you want. You’re a free subscriber to Bulwark+. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and ad-free and member-only podcasts, become a paying subscriber. Did you know? You can update your newsletter preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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