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I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.
Here’s the chain of events I see.
Trump wanted congressional Republicans to arrange for him a smooth path to January 20th, and actually a bit past January 20th. (He didn’t want high-stakes crisis stuff waiting for him on day one.) And they did that. That was the plan. Then Elon Musk barged in and blew the whole thing up. Precisely why he did this or whether there was a particular reason isn’t even totally clear. Maybe it was just impulse or a desire to show who was calling the shots. Next, Trump and Johnson were forced to cobble together a clean-up plan because the government is about to run out of funds and shut down before Christmas. They did that and Trump demanded House Republicans vote for it. He was more explicit than he normally has to be about the repercussions for anyone who defied him. And then 38 of them defied him. And now the whole thing is dead in the water.
Did those 38 defy Elon Musk? I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem like he stated any real preference one way or another. He just blew things up and left.
In a way it’s very Trumpy. Musk’s the chaos agent. But it’s his chaos. Everyone has to react to him. Including Donald Trump.
Again, why did Musk do this? David Dayen at the Prospect says it’s because he wants to protect his factories in China. Maybe that’s true. I have no idea. But the more salient fact in my mind isn’t so much why Musk did it as that he did it and that he could do it. He’s calling the shots. It’s not clear to me that he’s doing it in a particularly linear way. He may be like Rahad Jackson, the Alfred Molina character walking around with the gun in his underwear in that classic scene from Boogie Nights. But he’s got the gun and he’s calling the shots.