Elon Musk holds no public office. He has never stood for election, passed scrutiny for appointment to public office, nor commanded a political force of any measure. He is, however, the latest star and favorite of Donald Trump, the president-elect. So when Musk issues one of his off-the-cuff missives via his decrepit social network, X, Trump loyalists (almost all the Republicans) take him seriously.
Yet now, suddenly, Musk has the power to shut down the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world and depose his party’s legislative leader, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican lawmaker from Louisiana.
Very early Wednesday morning, fueled by hubris and whatever else, Musk called for the US House of Representatives to reject the negotiated continuing resolution that it must pass this week to keep the federal government funded.
“This bill should not pass,” the richest human being in the world wrote at 4.15am ET. Musk followed up for hours, using every derogatory word he could muster to describe a bill he almost certainly had not read nor understood. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote Wednesday afternoon.
Johnson spent months garnering enough votes among his divided caucus (plus Democrats, with whom he must negotiate to get such a bill passed) to send the resolution to the Democrats who control the Senate until next month and then to the president, Joe Biden. Johnson knows the failure to pass this resolution would cause great harm to 4 million federal employees and those who depend on their services right before the holidays. Farmers would go without subsidy payments. Small businesses would not get their loan payments. Kids in head start programs would have no place to go during the work day, forcing parents to take time off from work and possibly lose jobs. Active-duty military personnel would work with no December or January paychecks until Congress passes such a resolution.
Because of this impasse, congressional Republicans might force Johnson to resign as speaker and yet another chaotic scramble for that job would ensue. Johnson is the third Republican leader since Trump first took office in 2017. Every time one resigns the factions of the Republican party generate grinding conflict. The last one, after Kevin McCarthy resigned in 2023 after negotiating a similar agreement with Democrats, yielded a standoff and the ultimate ascension of Johnson, considered a rightwing extremist and Trump loyalist. But talking to Democrats at all now makes one unacceptable to the Trump crowd. So there is a good chance that not only will the government not function for weeks or months, it won’t even have the opportunity to come back until the Republicans can once again choose a speaker. That is not going to be easy.
According to news reports, many Republican members of Congress took Musk’s rant seriously, and feared crossing Trump’s new buddy who allegedly will head some yet-to-be-created federal office that is supposed to ferret out waste from the federal government.
In such an unstable political environment, with no real party discipline within Congress, figures like Musk have unprecedented influence. Being called out by someone with that much volume would be debilitating to one’s political career.
Much about the second rise of Donald Trump, like that of the first, undermines or overthrows everything we thought we knew about power and politics. Trump seems to maintain his support in spite of, if not because of, his willingness to blow everything up, to flaunt norms of decorum and law and to engage in fabulous hyperbole that bears little grounding in reality.
Musk, who built his early reputation as a charismatic leader of upstart companies like PayPal and Tesla (neither of which he actually founded), inflated his ego faster than he inflated his wealth, merged with Trump to share these features. Years of pushing the limits of automobile and financial regulation, often breaking those limits but rarely held accountable for those abrogations, have left Musk feeling invincible yet victimized. He’s a whiner more than a winner.
Musk is also an immigrant (who worked illegally in the United States for a time) who has turned on immigrants and a former free-speech advocate who has turned off the ability of his critics and independent journalists to find voice on his platform.
The lesson of Musk’s effort to shut down the US government and depose the Republican speaker of the House is that he has no interest in building, maintaining or managing anything responsibly. We know that already from how he runs X, the company he has all-but-destroyed since being forced by a court to buy it. The only things that have kept his two significant companies afloat have been teams of well compensated lawyers and engineers who have kept federal subsidies, loans and contracts (none of which are endangered by the looming shutdown) flowing to both companies.
Musk, like Trump, does not believe rules should apply to rich men. As long as the rest of us keep rewarding them for that, they will not be deterred and neither will the next crop of rich men. And now, with Musk mimicking Trump, we have two chaos agents tearing the basic functions of government apart while betraying and mocking the rule of law.
This is the first test of the United States to keep functioning under this new, radical, unleashed Trump. So far, this nation is failing and falling.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018).
