The Scene
Democrats and Republicans agreed with each other on Thursday: Elon Musk had taken over the government, derailing up a funding deal that the elected representatives of the people had negotiated.
They disagreed about whether this was a good thing.
“Elon Musk, this unelected man, said, we’re not doing this deal, and Donald Trump followed along,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told reporters on Thursday. Other Democrats said that they’d warned about exactly this — the wealthiest man in the world, running the government — before the election.
“Elon Musk wants to make government more efficient for himself, and not for other people,” said Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the incoming chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “He’s happy to kill disaster relief funding, because if there’s a disaster, Musk can just go hang out on Mars.”
But for many Republicans, a process shaped by Musk was far superior to the muddle they were used to. On the Musk-owned X, where the CEO had posted dozens of tweets with accurate and inaccurate information about the contents of the continuing resolution, they cheered him for taking the lead on a demolition job that Trump himself joined Wednesday night.
Democrats warned that Musk was usurping Speaker Mike Johnson’s power. Republicans said that voters had given Musk a mandate when they elected Trump — and would it be so bad, really, if Musk did run the House?
“The DOGE movement is enormously popular in the House,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee told podcaster Benny Johnson. “That being the case, given that they all express such affection for Vivek [Ramaswamy] and for Elon, let them choose one of them — I don’t care which one — to be their speaker. That would revolutionize everything. It would break up the firm. We would now have government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
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Democrats weren’t happy about the spending bill pileup — a near-tradition in Congress. But for the first time since losing the Nov. 5 elections, many were on message, ready to deploy talking points they’d workshopped all year.
Republicans, they said, had handed over the government to the wealthiest man in the world, “President Elon Musk.” And he would throw out benefits Americans needed in order to fund more tax cuts.
“Elon Musk wasn’t elected by anybody, yet he’s exercising his authority over Trump and House Republicans,” said Rhode Island Rep. Gabe Amo, who had worked in the Obama and Biden White Houses during Republican-led shutdowns and near-shutdowns. “It’s a dangerous start to this next Trump administration.”
Some progressive legislators shared AI-generated images of Musk being sworn in as president; plenty referred to Musk as “president,” picking up an argument that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had made then abandoned in October, as Musk stepped up his campaigning for Musk. All agreed that Johnson had given up power to the leaders of the unofficial DOGE operation, as a way to let Trump’s whims run over Congress.
“Johnson’s acquiescing because he’s weak,” said Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen. “It’s really the first step in autocracy. Day one, [Trump] will be a dictator. Day two, and forever after, he will be an oligarchical autocrat.”
Room for Disagreement
As comfortable as they were with anti-Musk talking points, Democrats were more muddled on what might emerge from the blown-up negotiations.
Trump’s sudden demand that Congress scrap the debt limit, which Republicans had repeatedly used as leverage against Democrats, won over Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who wrote that “Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking.”
That clashed with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who wrote on Bluesky that the idea got a “hard pass” from him: “GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check.”
And some Democrats had embraced the concept of DOGE, wanting a seat at the table as Republicans out-source government cuts and reform to Musk and Ramaswamy.
“When in America do we not even want to have the conversation?” Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz told NPR this month, defending his decision to join a GOP-led DOGE Caucus that has no specific role in the reforms, but has gobbled up media attention. “This idea of staying in your safe space and only talking to people you agree with didn’t work for us in the last election.”
David’s view
Democrats agree that the sight of the wealthiest man on earth riding roughshod over Congress will be a loser — practically and politically. They went from denial to befuddlement about how a party led by a billionaire, surrounded by billionaires, and filling his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires, could win so many working class votes.
That was the thinking they took into the CR debacle. A Quinnipiac University poll this week found that only 41% of voters approved of the role Musk had taken in the Trump transition — promising for Democrats, who have been worried to see Trump’s approval rating since his victory.
But 81% of Republicans did approve of it, and in other polls, approval of Congress itself is far lower. The original CR’s pay raise for members of Congress, its first in 15 years, was the easiest for Republicans to throw out in their post-Musk negotiations.
Republicans are operating in an information space where the question here — should a successful CEO run the country, not 535 members of Congress? — is obviously answered “yes.” One of Ramaswamy’s favorite lines during his presidential bid, defending his plan to fire half the federal workforce, was that “if you can’t fire somebody who works for you, that means they don’t work for you.”
This is why Lee, and other Republicans, are so comfortable saying that government-by-Musk would be the will of the people. They don’t see this as a clash between the elected and the unelected. They see it as a clash between the competent, as shown by their success in the private sector, and the incompetent — the latter category consisting of elected members of Congress and bureaucrats that nobody voted for.
Notable
- In his Substack, Paul Krugman predicts that the Musk move against the CR, driven in part by misinformation about what it contained, will hurt the incoming administration. “You might have imagined that the world’s richest man could have a couple of fact-checkers on retainer to help ensure that he isn’t making clearly stupid assertions. But nooo.”