Elon Musk just killed Donald Trump's honeymoon [View all]

Elon Musk just killed Donald Trump's honeymoon
We are seeing is an emerging crack in the GOP coalition

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published December 20, 2024 9:09AM (EST)


(Salon) 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.)

....(snip)....

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, back bench 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.

....(snip)....

That didn't work out the way they planned it. Trump thought he had cleverly boxed Elon 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.

....(snip)....

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? ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/20/elon-musk-just-donald-honeymoon/