Beginning of the end: Elon Musk overreaches in his relationship with Donald Trump

Cracks are already appearing in the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with the Tesla billionaire asserting his authority.

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Oh dear. Bad omens are afoot. We may have seen, this week, the start of an inevitable deterioration in the power couple bromance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Short version: an unelected billionaire from South Africa, who has never held public office and is, in fact, ineligible to be the American president, appears to have seized effective control of the US government. And he’s done it under the very nose of the guy the American people actually chose, quite recently, to lead that government.

Mr Trump famously has a low tolerance for being upstaged, or for being seen as the junior partner in any relationship. Mr Musk has seemingly decided to test that tolerance.

The roar before the storm. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

For context, here, we need to discuss the less than thrilling subject of American congressional procedure. I promise there is a compelling personal drama buried amid the paperwork.

Here’s the situation. The House of Representatives, which has been controlled by Mr Trump’s Republican Party since January of 2023, was meant to pass an appropriations bill – essentially a federal budget – in September of that year.

We are now in mid-December of 2024, and still the job hasn’t been done. No appropriations bill has been passed. Instead, the House has repeatedly resorted to passing something called a continuing resolution, which keeps paying for the government at its existing level of funding for a limited time, usually just a few months. It’s a stopgap measure, intended to give Congress more time to pass something more permanent.

Now the time has come to pass another continuing resolution, so the government can keep treading water over the Christmas period. If the deadline passes, on Friday local time, without Congress acting, the government will go into shutdown mode.

That means federal government employees don’t get paid. It means airports close. It means Americans who currently rely on government support, most importantly those affected by the recent natural disaster in North Carolina, don’t get their money. Among other catastrophes.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a conservative Republican, obviously doesn’t want that to happen. So he spent months negotiating a deal for one more continuing resolution with the opposition party, the Democrats.

Spare a thought for this guy, Mike Johnson. His next few years of being harangued from all sides are not going to be fun. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

Then yesterday happened. Mere days before the deadline, Elon decided he hated the bill, and set to work killing it. In a barrage of well over a hundred tweets throughout the day, Mr Musk highlighted funding measures he disagreed with (frequently getting his facts wrong, for what that’s worth), and threatening to ensure any Republican who voted in favour of the bill would be turfed out of office at the next election.

Mr Trump, who is of course the actual President-elect, and actual leader of the Republican Party, remained conspicuously silent as Elon delighted in sowing his chaos. Ultimately, the billionaire owner of Twitter successfully bullied Republicans into torching the bill they, themselves, had authored.

Only very late in the day did Mr Trump finally say something publicly, offering a statement that supported Elon’s position. Who was leading, there, and who was following? The question does present itself quite deliciously.

You can ignore Kid Rock, here. He played no role in torpedoing funding for the federal government. Nor, really, did the President-elect. It’s the guy doing a duck face in his faux-Top Gun leather jacket who ran the show. Picture: Kena Betancur/AFP

The Republicans managed to come up with a new proposal today, which stripped out some funding – $US190 million slated for pediatric cancer research, for example. At last those awful leeches on the public purse, children with cancer, were shown who’s boss!

Mr Trump explicitly endorsed that new proposal, describing it as “a very good deal for the American people”.

“All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our country and vote YES for this bill!” he said.

Congress rejected it. All Democrats and an intriguingly high number of Republicans, 38, voted against it. So the prospect of a shutdown looms ever closer.

Again, we have Congress supporting Elon’s position over the President-elect’s.

“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed!” Elon tweeted after successfully nuking the original deal.

“VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.”

Elon uses that Latin phrase, meaning “the voice of the people is the voice of God”, quite frequently when he gets his way. I do wish he would look up its origin. It appeared first in an eighth-century letter written by the Saxon scholar Alcuin to the emperor Charlemagne. Alcuin wrote: “Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always close to insanity.”

I suspect Elon has never bothered to read the full quote.

Vox populi, vox dei! Or to adapt it for our times: the voice of right-wing weirdos on Twitter is the voice of God! Dunno how to say that in Latin. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

Among his other tweets in these past 48 hours (there have been a great many of them), Elon suggested Congress should pass no continuing resolution at all, and indeed no legislation, until Mr Trump takes office on January 20.

Yeah, OK. Elon has more money than a lone man could ever spend. If the government shuts down over Christmas, he’ll be fine. He can hop on his private plane, fly off to some delightful hotspot and enjoy a holiday while workers are not being paid their salaries, and millions of people can’t visit their families because the public airports have stopped functioning.

It’s easy, with that level of wealth, to be blasé. To say: “Oh well, let’s shut it all down for a month, and pass no bills, and turn significant parts of the government into a non-functioning mess until Donald Trump takes office.” Doesn’t hurt Elon one jot.

It’s the little people, the ones who exhaust their bank accounts each month, who will suffer. Who won’t have the money to buy their kids Christmas presents, because they have to at least put a meal on the table each day.

The sheer callousness of Elon’s attitude, regarding this nightmare scenario, is galling to an extent almost beyond words.

This is a person who seems to care more about adulation from the sewers of the internet than how his actions affect people in their real lives.

He’s a guy who ignores information from official sources, but believes whatever patently nonsensical crap shameless rage-baiters and engagement farmers like LibsofTikTok, Catturd, or EndWokeness tweet at him.

And all of a sudden he is the guy dictating government policy, and dictating to Congress, and overriding the person he spent more than $US200 billion to get elected as president.

Elon. Not commander-in-chief. But influencer-in-chief. Picture: Allison Robbert/AFP

This situation is not sustainable. The political right loves to rant about unelected bureaucrats, the so-called “deep state”, making policy. Here we have an unelected billionaire, with a long list of vested interests, haranguing Congress into following his whims and impulses.

It’s hard to imagine Mr Trump putting up with this interference, from Elon, for long. In his mind, he’s already rewarded the man for his financial support, by appointing him to co-lead a new government department aimed at cutting waste.

Mr Trump did not pick him to be co-president.

“As soon as Trump figures out that Elon Musk is bigfooting him, and making him look pretty weak, I think Trump is going to marginalise him pretty quick,” conservative commentator S.E. Cupp told CNN today.

“He’ll become as irrelevant as everyone else who has taken up Trump’s spotlight in the past.”

Those remarks are in addition to plenty of posts and comments this week referring to Elon as the real president. Some of them from Democrats, obviously and cynically aimed at triggering Mr Trump. But not all of them.

Grok even knows that he's President-elect Musk. pic.twitter.com/LjJwtRVqxp

— Devin Duke (@sirDukeDevin) December 19, 2024

The President-elect’s spokesman was sufficiently moved to release a statement, yesterday, clarifying that Mr Trump was still in charge.

“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the continuing resolution, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

Hmmmmm. What actually happened was this: Elon lobbied Republicans to ditch the bill, while Mr Trump said nothing. Once it became apparent that Elon had succeeded in killing it, Mr Trump belatedly came out to echo his position.

That is not authority. It’s a last-minute scramble to save face.

One of the fundamental traits, of Mr Trump, is that he’s always been too concerned about attention and adulation.

He likes being president. He likes the title, and the trappings, and he likes being on TV. He’s never really run for office wanting to accomplish some specific nefarious agenda.

But he surrounds himself with loyalists, and those loyalists do believe vehemently in what they say, and they are going to try to use the power that comes with his office to achieve their aims. So we end up with people like Elon, and Stephen Miller, running the government while Mr Trump watches cable television until 11am every morning.

That is the style of government Americans elected. Now they get to enjoy the consequences.

Twitter: @SamClench

Originally published as Beginning of the end: Elon Musk overreaches in his relationship with Donald Trump