Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue. They had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.)
However, he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican Party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did, which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
The activist base that had recently fashioned itself as the Tea Party after Obama’s election in 2008, quietly reinvented itself as the MAGA movement and lost all interest in fiscal austerity the minute Trump came on the scene. But there has always been some restiveness among the right-wing ideologues in the House and Senate who really want to massively cut discretionary spending and the so-called entitlements to the bone. They’re true believers in the idea that government should not help people, period. They were relegated to the back bench during Trump’s first term and spent most of their time tilting at windmills because Trump was happily spending like the treasury was his own credit line at Deutsche Bank.
He had no appetite for big spending cuts that might hurt his chances for re-election. After all, he didn’t run as a budget-cutting deficit hawk. He always claimed that he didn’t need to drastically cut spending because the debt would disappear with tariffs and unprecedented growth. He said the same thing during the 2024 campaign, insisting that it would even pay for government-funded child care, the worst of all possible worlds.
He pays lip service to cutting spending but he doesn’t really care about it. He’s told people he’s not worried about a U.S. debt crisis as he’ll be out of office by then. And he’s got stuff he wants to spend a lot of money on, like deporting millions of immigrants!
That’s never been clearer than this week when Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., presented the bipartisan continuing resolution to fund the government until March and all hell broke loose in the House. Those rascally, backbench Tea Party/Freedom Caucus ideologues finally got the leader they’ve been waiting for and his name is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
It was a given that the Freedom Caucus gang would not vote for the bill. They vote no on everything. It had been negotiated by the bipartisan negotiators in both chambers with the knowledge that the Senate was still in Democratic hands and the tiny GOP majority in the House required a bipartisan compromise. Everyone knew that the screamers in the House would have a fit and call for Mike Johnson’s head (which is why they changed the rule raising the threshold from one member to nine.) And since the speaker knows better than to go to the john without getting Trump’s permission, you can be sure that Trump was kept informed of all of this. They all agreed that they would get rid of this hot potato, adjourn quickly and go home for the holidays.
That didn’t work out the way they planned it. Trump thought he had cleverly boxed Musk out of real power by creating a powerless “commission” for him and his sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy to come up with enormous spending cuts to reduce the federal government by as much as a third, which he knows won’t happen. However, Trump has essentially empowered Musk to speak for him by having him by his side every minute for the last three months. And seeing as he’s the richest man in the world who owns a major social media platform, he has plenty of power all on his own.
Apparently, Musk decided that it was time to show the world who’s really in charge. As the anointed budget cutter in chief he took great umbrage that anyone would think of passing legislation that didn’t pass muster with him personally and he took to his social media platform to demand that the Republicans refuse to pass the bill, ordering a government shutdown until Trump takes office. The bill quickly fell apart, prompting Donald Trump, who clearly had no idea what was going on, to rush out with a statement that it was he who ordered that the bill be scrapped:
“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR [continuing resolution], Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,”
But it was too late. The memes had already taken hold: Elon Musk is the actual president and Trump is just an old guy playing golf and holding court at his gaudy beach club in Palm Beach every night.
Trump then came up with what he thought was a clever idea to take control by demanding that they only pass a bill if it also delayed or eliminated the debt ceiling, which just showed how out of touch he is with the dynamic in the House. (As I said, Trump has a lot of spending to do and he doesn’t want the debt ceiling hanging over his head.) But if President Elon’s accomplices in the Freedom Caucus are on a crusade against more government spending, why in the world would they agree to eliminate the debt ceiling?
Trump no doubt thought the Democrats would bail him out because they have often done so in the past and they always wanted to get rid of that silly contrivance. Sadly for him, they said “hell no” and refused to vote for the pared down bill Johnson and the Republicans proposed without Democratic input. 38 Republicans also voted against it because of the debt ceiling demand Trump has inserted which is a full slap in the face of Dear Leader.
It’s Elon Musk’s House now. In fact, a bunch of Republicans are proposing that they fire Johnson and make him Speaker instead.
Musk is now furiously trying to mend fences with Trump by threatening to primary Democrats, blaming them for what he actually did. It’s highly probable that his demand for a government shutdown over Christmas, which Trump knows will be blamed on the Republicans because they are always the ones who cause these things, has killed Trump’s honeymoon.
What we are seeing is an emerging crack in the GOP coalition between the MAGA populists like Trump and JD Vance who want big government for their own ends and the fiscal hawks like Musk and Ramaswamy who want to burn the whole place down. There are many overlapping interests within the two camps but it’s clearly starting to come apart largely because Trump made himself a much lamer duck than he needed to be.
Trump wanted the richest man in the world by his side, for both the glamour and the lucre he brings with him, and it’s blowing up in his face. How’s Trump going to get rid of Musk now that he’s shown he has more clout with the base than he does? Who owns the MAGA brand now?
