As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.
In this case, you had a lot of drama mostly over nothing. In a way Musk “won.” But it’s not entirely clear what he won. And it’s also not clear whether the had any particular goal other than flexing and having fun.
What we can be sure of is a lot of chaotic drama like we saw over the last few days, a lot of broken crockery, much of which will impact ordinary people as a product of that drama, and then a lot of government action (what the winning billionaire does with state power) that is generally bad for average people living on a budget. Among the relatively small number of things funded in the original continuing resolution (that Musk torched) were a couple hundred million to fight childhood cancer and another program to cut the costs of prescription drugs. If I’m understanding the latest news, the anti-child cancer spending was put back in but the prescription drug pricing stuff was not. Meanwhile, the new deal which passed this evening at least notionally commits the GOP to taking health care coverage away from millions of Americans in 2025 and doing various things to fund big tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
So a lot of drama and chaos and distraction, sometimes having a lot of costs, sometimes a lot of drama over basically nothing. But in each case it’s drama on the way to really destructive policy.
This is bad for the country. But one thing is unavoidably clear: If you were a party coming off a stinging defeat and looking for ways to burnish your brand as the party focused on the needs of average Americans on a budget you could scarcely ask for a better environment in which to do it. Even beyond what I described above, with these two rough beasts slouching their way into 2025, you have probably never had a time in American history where you have all the billionaires lining up and saying pretty much openly and loudly that we’re here as Team Billionaire and here to support the billionaire President and excited to usher in a new era of government of the billionaires, quite literally by the billionaires and really obviously for the billionaires.
To wrap it all together you also have the gobs of public time and attention and resources lit on fire by the tantrums, egomania and sundry character disorders of people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk because that’s a central feature of billionairedom: the rules don’t apply to you. Things most of us had to get straight with when we were in our 20s, because we live in the real world, guys like Elon Musk have magnified 100-fold by their 50s because the rules don’t apply to them.
Needless to say, it’s not great. But it really is tailor made for a politics focused on being the defense of ordinary Americans living on a budget.
