Finally, the long-predicted fallout between Musk and Trump appears to have happened. Is it for real? When Musk announced his “retirement” from DOGE a few days ago, a lot of people thought it was an act, that he’d just shift to being a less visible player. And that might have been the plan. but I think this is for real now. Musk is continuing to trash Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which is kicking Trump where it hurts.
I don’t have more than speculation on what these two guys are thinking or feeling. But the White House took a big swipe at Musk by canning Musk’s handpicked NASA chief the day after his cringey departure ceremony. That action both took something valuable away from Musk and treated him with a very public disrespect. So while Musk is clearly trying to undo the ocean of brand damage he brought on himself and his companies, I don’t think the White House is playing along and trying to help with that project. I think they’re really trying to show him who’s boss, a classic example of Trumpian dominance politics.
These two are capable of doing a lot of harm to each other. Musk could put his money into defeating MAGA candidates. Trump could cancel the contracts Musk arranged for himself while he had his fingers in the government. I don’t know those things will happen. And as of Wednesday afternoon I can’t find any reaction from Trump about what Musk said, which is uncharacteristic of Trump. I do think Musk’s ravings — which are about how the bill spends too much money, not about how it cuts too much taxes — might possibly soften support for the bill in Congress. And there are little signs that might be happening. See, for example, After Muscling Their Bill Through the House, Some Republicans Have Regrets.
However, they’re still in denial about what the BUB would do to the deficit. The CBO just came out with the official score:
The sweeping Republican bill for President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to a new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It is slightly higher than an earlier version of the bill, which the CBO projected to add $2.3 trillion in new debt.
The report also says that 10.9 million Americans would lose their health care coverage if the bill becomes law. I doubt you’ll get many congressional Republicans on record acknowledging this. But there may be a few.
I am cheering for anything that slows the bill down, because I suspect the longer it stalls, the less likely it will pass, or at least pass without substantial changes. There appear to be a handful of Republican senators, including Josh Hawley, who realize the fallout of gutting Medicaid and probably Medicare would have real-world consequences that could hurt their constituents and, worse, hurt their re-election chances.
I also think that Trump is not exactly growing political capital. If he’s really lost Musk, what about the rest of the Tech Bros? There are news stories going back a couple of months saying that tech leaders were “breaking up” with Trump, which I hadn’t noticed.
But Trump also recently burned bridges between himself and Leonard Leo, and the Federalist Society generally, and that might be more significant than losing Musk. See Elie Mystal at The Nation, Trump Is Headed to War With the Federalist Society—and It’s Gonna Be Huge. Mystal is writing about judicial appointments, but it’s also the case that pretty much all conservative judges on the bench today are Federalist Society judges. And they are more loyal to Leonard Leo than they are to Trump. This is not going to help Trump in court. At some point he’s going to start looking pretty damn ineffectual.
I realize that most Americans have no idea what’s going on. I say that because Trump’s disapproval numbers are staying stubbornly stuck in the upper 40s. But as the year goes on I suspect at least some of the low-info crowd will notice the real world. Because as much incompetence as Trump has packed into his administration there will be screwups, and some of those screwups will be so big and splashy that even the low-infos will notice them. At least, we can hope. I don’t want another Hurricane Katrina-level disaster, but do remember what that did to George W. Bush. He never recovered.
The MAGA movement is basically a nihilistic one. It doesn’t know what it’s for, just what it’s against. It looks to Trump to restore an America that never existed, without realizing that Trump is destroying everything that did make America great. I don’t expect them to learn. But according to YouGov, “Among the entire population of adult citizens, the share of MAGA supporters has never risen above 20%.” I would have guessed 30%, but I’ll take 20%. That means there’s a lot of room for approval numbers to go down before they hit the 20% floor.
And at some point, maybe even Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene will start to ignore him.