How President Musk’s scheme for world domination is going | Will Bunch Newsletter

Happy holidays from the Will Bunch Newsletter! It’s a weird, chaotic time to celebrate Christmas Eve and the rest of our multicultural buffet that helps us endure the dark and frigid winter solstice, but we’ve been here before. I still remember December 1968 just before my 10th birthday, after a year of assassinations, riots and war. It was that fraught Christmas Eve when Apollo 8 sent back the very first, amazing pictures of Earth taken from orbiting the Moon, and reminded us why we needed to save the home we all share. Hold onto that.

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It seems like just yesterday we were looking ahead to 2024 and worrying that what seemed certain to be a tumultuous year — and indeed it was! — would end with Donald Trump possessing way too much power over America. Now, with 359 days down and only seven more to go, we are learning that the real year-end question is whether Elon Musk is going to have too much control over our lives.

That’s not exactly an improvement, is it?

What felt like a slow motion train wreck over the last 12 months — the richest person on Earth gravitating toward Trump and then hurling himself into the race by relocating to Pennsylvania and spending $277 million in sofa change from his $430 billion windfall to get the twice-impeached and quadruple-indicted GOP nominee elected, all while steering his powerful social network, X, toward a cliff on his extreme right — accelerated and slammed into Capitol Hill at full speed last week.

The electric-vehicle and rocket magnate showed a stunned nation that, with a frighteningly manic binge of about 100 often misleading and sometimes false tweets on X, the president-elect’s now-right-hand man could derail — at least temporarily, and with some significant impact — a congressional deal to keep the federal government open.

When this two-day bender of tweets and Capitol Hill chaos ended, there were a lot more questions then answers. Why did Musk suddenly go off against the spending deal, and why did so many GOP congressman respond to a man who hasn’t been elected to anything, ever? Why did Trump seem to follow Musk’s lead on almost sparking a government shutdown, instead of the other way around? In the end, which mattered more — the big loss that Democrats and renegade Republicans inflicted on the two-headed beast by rejecting their call to end the debt ceiling, or the victories that will likely help Musk financially, because apparently $430 billion is not enough?

Above all, who is really running the show here? Trump, who at age 78 seems increasingly frail and detached even before taking the oath of office, or Musk, the South African immigrant who can’t become president under the Constitution but can apparently just buy the same level of clout?

Even Trump himself, in a campaign-rally type speech to a Turning Point USA confab in Phoenix on Sunday, felt compelled to respond to the growing chatter that America suddenly finds itself with a “President Musk” calling the shots.

“No, that’s not happening...he’s not going to be president; that I can tell you,” Trump said. “I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country.” He tried to turn on a smile to suggest that Trump finds all of this humorous, but he looked instead more like a man in the throes of hemorrhoids.

It’s a most unsettling state of affairs, and it’s difficult to write about because it’s hard to yet know where this is going in the long run. It’s unclear whether Musk’s seeming leveraged buyout of the federal government is both so brazen and so amateurish that it will actually impede the Trump-run dictatorship that was the original Project 2025, or whether the future is getting even more ominous than our fears of 12 months ago. Here are the important things to watch right now:

— Musk’s influence on Trump and, thus, the GOP is already reaping wins that will help the business interests of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, which in any ordinary time — and clearly this is no ordinary time — would be a big scandal. As reported by the American Prospect’s David Dayen, the original version of the year-end bill that triggered Musk’s freakout on X included a bipartisan deal for a long-discussed ban on U.S. firms investing in “sensitive technologies,” like AI or semiconductors, in China. That would have directly affected Musk, who currently plans to build a factory for self-driving Teslas in China and probably has other like-minded schemes. The China ban was stripped from the final bill.

The Musk interference that eventually gained Trump’s support also killed a negotiated provision that would have lowered prescription drug costs by ending a pricing scheme that boosted profits for the so-called “middlemen” in U.S. healthcare; pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs.

Why? The best explanation is that billionaire oligarchs like Musk oppose any concept of government regulation. But what’s crazy is that Trump — the actual guy the voters supposedly elected on Nov. 5 — had just told a news conference that the government needs to restrain the “rich as hell” middlemen of Big Pharma, the very thing then stripped from the bill. So, yeah, who’s really in charge here?

— Beyond the government funding bill, Musk continues to prove the Springsteen dictum that “a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.” It’s clear that his $430 billion net worth — swollen these past six weeks by investors giddy over the prospect of a Musk-ian global domination — means that the $277 million he spent buying the American presidency feels like when a mobster casually tosses the nightclub valet-parking guy a $100 tip, So, Musk is now sizing up the West’s other fragile democracies.

For Musk, the self-drive to planetary rule involves a sharp turn to the far right. He’s proposed giving $100 million to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party, which would roil British politics, and then it got even worse. This weekend, Musk endorsed the extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, tweeting: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Never mind that the AfD is infected with a serious strain of the neo-Nazism meant to have been snuffed out in 1945. People have every reason to be terrified about what Musk’s obscene wealth has wrought.

Except...

— The weird events of last week also revealed Musk is inept, utterly lacking in knowledge or curiosity about how governing actually works, and out-of-control in ways that it’s hard not to wonder if it was really Musk, or the ketamine or whatever, doing the talking. It showed a pathway for the Musk administration to self-drive itself into a ditch, either by triggering Trump’s vanity, which has probably already happened, or — even better — lighting a fire under Democrats and others who’ve seemed far top pliable in bending a knee to Trump and his 49.8% victory.

Certainly congressional Democrats — who’ve looked cowed into searching for ways to work with Trump instead of resisting American authoritarianism — got back some of their mojo for a newfound “Musk resistance.” They even cleverly maneuvered to restore childhood cancer funding that the Trump-Musk tag team had nearly killed, just because they thought they could.

We can only hope that Musk’s brazen power play to take his newly purchased White House out for a test drive before the papers were even signed has been a wake-up call for how far America is already going off the rails, and what can happen if we don’t grab the steering wheel back. People can and will keep debating what the November election really meant but one thing is very clear: No one voted for a President Musk.

Question: What’s your take on Fetterman? Is he the next Manchin? — Barbara C. (@2bluejays.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Ugh. If you haven’t been following the John Fetterman follies, Pennsylvania’s junior and allegedly Democratic senator is sounding more and more MAGA Trump-y with each interview he gives, as he endorses some of the president-elect’s controversial cabinet picks and plays footsie with others. On Sunday, Fetterman told ABC News that Trump is “a singular political talent,” suggesting he believes the once and future POTUS has unlocked the key for reaching blue-collar and rural voters that also motivated his own 2022 election. He seems totally on track for becoming the Senate’s next Kyrsten Sinema, a true independent priding himself on annoying just about everyone. That’s a shame. The 2022 Fetterman seemed onto something, both in connecting to rural voters and addressing issues like marijuana reform that were falling through the cracks. The Fetterman 2025 model seems hopelessly lost.

A large number of readers were eager to weigh in about the wave of reported drone sightings over New Jersey and the media’s overcaffeinated coverage. Most agreed (with me, for what it’s worth) that the significance was in the moral panic and not driven much by actual drones. I think reader David (include your last name, when you can) nailed it that it “stems, in large part, from real fear over our combined dependence upon and lack of control over advanced technology.” Added Denise Mueller: " I feel we are experiencing a political apocalypse and east coast leadership and mainstream news is again diverting our attention to look at the shiny objects."

📮 This week’s question: How do you handle a problem like Elon Musk? How worried are you about his rising influence in U.S. politics, and do you see him as a real threat or as a billionaire liability that could help implode the MAGA movement? Please email me your answer and be sure to put “Elon Musk” in the subject line.

A story that broke out of Texas this weekend is sad both for the folks involved but also for what it said about the current state of national politics. A missed vote on keeping the federal government by a once-influential House Republican, Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, sparked the discovery that the congresswoman had not voted on anything, or been seen much at the Capitol, since July. Somehow, it took a right-wing Dallas publication with an owner who’d politically opposed Granger to finally publish what the rest of the media has missed: the representative for Texas' 12th District was in an assisted living residence back home and, a son later confirmed, dealing with dementia issues.

Granger, 81, had stepped aside as chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee this spring but not resigned her seat. No one on her staff or in GOP leadership thought it important to tell voters the truth. Even more troubling is that this was just an extreme case of the dramatic aging of political leadership in Washington — unique to neither Granger nor the Republican Party. Here in Philly, Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans, 70, has failed to keep a promise to return and resume voting after experiencing a stroke in May, yet he was reelected and vows he’ll return in 2025.

I’ve been critical in this space against ageism, but it’s increasingly legitimate to ask whether the determination of boomers (or older) to cling to personal power for as long as possible is stifling the new ideas and new voices needed to move forward. In what felt almost farcical, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, led a behind-the-scenes campaign to make sure that Rep. Gerry Connolly, 74, defeated the dynamic 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — popular with young voters essential to any Democratic bounce-back — to become top Dem on the House Oversight Committee. Pelosi did this from Luxembourg, where she’d fallen and broken her hip on an official visit. This, as the oldest president in U.S. history. Joe Biden, 82, is replaced by one who’ll be even older, Donald Trump (now 78), if he completes his term.

I’ve also written here before that the rise of a U.S. gerontocracy has its roots in the New Left of the 1960s which believed the human progress meant new possibilities for personal fulfillment. That’s swell, but over 60 years that’s evolved into a kind of me-first careerism where stepping down for the collective interest — and to give young folks a chance — is no longer a thought, obviously. The alienation of young Americans from a system that shuts them out is becoming palpable.

The unfortunate saga of Kay Granger exposes that, and also some of the other flaws in our increasingly broken system. That includes the death of local news and an era when metro or statewide papers had both D.C. correspondents and reporters on local congressional elections who’d notice when a member of Congress goes milk-carton MIA. Meanwhile, one thing I’d love to see as we enter a new year is more young people running for office to replace this stale status quo. I think voters would be highly receptive.

Yes, journalists are on the job 365 (or 366) days a year, including Christmas Eve. In 2012, during a moment of Obama backlash and GOP-driven gridlock in Washington, the movie Lincoln was a stunning reminder of the lost vision of what had originally led to the Republican Party. I wrote about the mid-19th century Pennsylvania firebrand Thaddeus Stevens, who would have been spinning in his grave over assaults from his beloved GOP on voting rights and public education. I wrote: “If Stevens were here, he’d be bashing Gov. Corbett and his pals as buffoons or worse, until they dragged him off the legislative floor.” The headline still holds up a dozen years later: “Where is Thaddeus Stevens when Pennsylvania needs him?”

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