Trump Dumping Musk Is Not Enough to Stop the Wreckage of the Federal Government
Over the past few weeks, Elon Musk has thrown around wads of money so great they made the stories of corruption in the Tammany Hall era, more than a century ago, seem positively quaint. The men of Tammany Hall bought votes with beer; Musk and the oligarchs shamelessly seek to buy them with straight checks.
In a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the world’s richest man reactivated the million-dollar lottery that he used to bring voters out in November for the presidential race, offering to pay individuals for their signatures on a petition (which notably could help Republicans gain voter information) and denouncing what he referred to as “activist” judges. As the election neared, and it became clear that the vote would essentially be a referendum on Musk and President Donald Trump’s unpopular gutting of the government, Musk’s hyperbolic language reached a fever pitch. Quite literally, he asserted, the future of Western civilization was hanging on the outcome of the race. “I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said in a rally during the campaign’s late days, “but I think it will.”
No judicial election in the United States (and probably none anywhere else in the world) has ever had anywhere near the amount of money injected into it that was added into the Wisconsin race once Musk opened the floodgates. And, in the end, nowhere near as much money in any other judicial race has ever been flushed down the toilet as was flushed by Musk in Wisconsin. It turns out that Musk’s political radar isn’t nearly as good as he thinks it is.
Despite the tycoon’s intervention — arguably because of his intervention — Democrats were motivated to come out in huge numbers this past Tuesday. Off-year elections are usually characterized by low turnout; this time around, however, almost two-thirds of registered voters cast ballots. In many parts of the state, turnout was upward of 15 points higher than in the last off-year election, in 2023.
The result was a blowout: Notwithstanding all the chatter about the Democratic Party being in a death spiral, Democratic Party-backed candidate Susan Crawford won by roughly 10 points in a race that, in normal years, would likely have been decided by a couple percent, and her win succeeded in preserving a liberal majority on the State Supreme Court. The resounding vote for Crawford represented a huge rejection of the Trump-Musk policy axis — and, more particularly, of Musk’s deeply offensive efforts to muscle democracy aside through the sheer power and scale of his wallet, and to use his made-up “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, to implement a bureaucratic coup against the functioning of the federal government. Trump, whose relationships with even close allies have always been ruthlessly transactional and mostly one-directional, was quick to react to the Wisconsin debacle, making clear that the unconditional loyalty that he demands of those around him is something he has yet to ever bestow on another. Instead of issuing a full-throttle defense of his enforcer and chief henchman, Trump let it be known, according to Politico, that Musk’s tenure at the center of D.C.’s ruthless circles of power could be coming to an end and that he would soon be returning to the private sector.
Of course, once the anonymous leaks sharing the potential shake-up led to all-too-predictable headlines, Trumplanders snarled about the liberal media, pouring their faux outrage on the flames. It was, Trump’s aides noted, simply a truism that Musk, as a special government employee, was only allowed to do 130 days of federal work, and that, regardless of the outcome of the Wisconsin vote, his time as the DOGE enforcer was coming to its natural conclusion. That is, of course, utter nonsense. Trump and Musk have trampled so many rules and regulations, so many constitutional provisions that it’s hard to imagine a mere regulation alone would be enough to show Musk to the exit. Nevertheless, to back up the fiction that all was good in the Musk-Trump world, the two co-rulers of what increasingly looks like a post-constitutional U.S. took to social media immediately after Politico reported that Musk’s DOGE days appear to be numbered, to denounce the story as “fake news” and to assure their base that Musk will remain integral to the government demolition project that has broken so much of the federal system since January 20.
Certainly, it remains the case that Trump needs Musk as his financial enforcer — he is, after all, the man with the wherewithal to bankroll Republican Party candidates, and to enact huge social media campaigns against anyone who might be tempted to buck his increasingly autocratic and irrational whims. Trump also needs Musk to deflect rage over unpopular policies away from the president and onto himself. And he needs Musk to smash through legal, regulatory and technological roadblocks that stand in the way of his dystopian vision of dismantling much of the federal government.
But while Musk is too vital to Trump’s autocratic project to dispense with entirely, the timeline Politico outlined for his stepping out of the spotlight suggested it wasn’t just a matter of his 130-day limit being reached.
Instead, it looks like it has more to do with voters’ comprehensive rejection of both Musk’s brutalizing means and also his ends — polling suggests that 6 in 10 voters really don’t like Musk, and a similar percentage oppose what DOGE is doing.
That anti-Musk fury is seen on the ground: People have engaged in organic, decentralized protests at Tesla outlets around the country, leading both Musk and Trump to declare that isolated instances of anti-Tesla vandalism should be considered acts of “domestic terrorism.” Trump has even mused that anyone who perpetrates such acts in the United States should be sent to the supermax prison in El Salvador,where his administration has disappeared hundreds of Venezuelan people snatched up by immigration police. And around the world, a boycott of Tesla has set in, helping to tank what used to be one of the hottest stocks in the world — and pushing Trump to try to shore up his friend’s company’s market value by putting together an extraordinary, and grotesquely degrading, sales pitch for Teslas from the White House lawn.
Yet, when push comes to shove, Trump has shown that all he really cares about is his own bottom line and political survival. And since Musk is increasingly seen as an albatross, it’s hardly a surprise that word has leaked from Trumpland that he may soon be eased off into less controversial pastures.
That said, don’t hold your breath in the hope that Musk’s malign influence will suddenly evaporate. Even if Trump had the inclination to entirely dissociate himself from his centibillionaire, chainsaw-wielding hatchet man, it’s far too late for him to easily do so. The two power-hungry and egotistical oligarchs are at this point joined at the hip, their capacity for wanton destruction too fine-tuned for Musk to glide off quietly into the shadows. Sure, Musk’s public federal role may soon be folded up, but his philosophy of testing the legal limits and breaking things at speed seems highly likely to remain a central, guiding methodology in Trump 2.0.
Where Caesar came and saw and conquered, Musk comes and sees and breaks. He’s a techno-roughrider, and that remains as true today as it was before Wisconsin voters gave the middle finger to the man who believes his money can buy everything, and everyone, on Earth.