Folie à Deux

You either die a hero or live long enough to see House Republicans threatened with primary challenges if they don’t vote to raise the debt ceiling.

That’s how that line goes, isn’t it?

In broad outline, the collapse on Wednesday of Speaker Mike Johnson’s bill to fund the government before it shuts down this weekend is a familiar story. Republicans have a tiny majority so they need to stick together to pass anything; they can’t stick together on spending bills because die-hard fiscal hawks like Thomas Massie and Chip Roy won’t go along; Johnson then has to beg Democrats for votes, forcing him to make policy concessions that infuriate the right.

Usually the story ends with the bill passing and populist Republicans firing off fundraising emails about being sold out again by “the uniparty.” Then everyone moves on until it’s time for another spending bill, when the cycle repeats.

That’s almost how it happened this time. As usual, the GOP couldn’t unite so Johnson had to wheel and deal with Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. In this case the concessions included $100 billion for disaster relief, $10 billion in economic aid to farmers, a land grant for a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., and even a modest pay raise for members of Congress. (After one of the most dysfunctional sessions in U.S. history!) It was a so-called “Christmas tree” just in time for the holidays. Fiscal conservatives were aghast when the text was released, but House members are eager to head home. Had Johnson put the bill on the floor quickly, he might have gotten to 218.

Instead he waited. Then Elon weighed in.

The second-most influential figure in the GOP lashed the spending bill in more than 100 posts on his social media platform on Wednesday, calling it “criminal” and declaring that anyone who votes for it deserves to be ousted in the next election. He lied egregiously about it in so doing, as tends to happen when populist demagogues are on the attack. Contra Musk, the bill wouldn’t raise congressional pay by 40 percent, wouldn’t force taxpayers to pay for the stadium in D.C., wouldn’t shield the January 6 Committee from investigation, and wouldn’t fund, er, “bioweapon labs.”

No matter. His 200 million followers on Twitter responded. Within hours, House Republican offices were getting an earful from constituents.

Later in the day, the most influential figure in the GOP spoke up. In a series of statements, after weeks of silence on the matter and with the shutdown deadline bearing down, Donald Trump declared that he, too, opposed the bill—chiefly because it contained no provision for raising the debt ceiling. Congress wasn’t expected to do any ceiling-raising until next summer, mind you, but “we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Trump bluntly declared. He went as far as to say that any Republican who votes for a “clean” funding bill that doesn’t hike the debt ceiling should be primaried, a complete perversion of the Tea Party ethos that drove right-wing populism when he entered politics in 2015.

Then, on Thursday morning, he told NBC News that Republicans should get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. Congrats to the many Reaganites who voted for a big-spending nationalist last month on the occasion of him muscling conservatives to forfeit what little leverage they still have over controlling the federal budget.

President Trump and Speaker Musk got their way. Johnson’s bill was pronounced dead on Wednesday evening. With less than 36 hours until the government shuts down as I write this on Thursday, House Republicans are scrambling to build support for their Plan B. Stay tuned—but it’s not going well so far.

We learned during Trump’s first term that a government run by the Joker can function, sort of, at least if he’s surrounded by a competent Cabinet. What does a government run by two Jokers look like, though?

Especially when their interests don’t align?

Out-Trumped.

If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time since Trump took over the party that some other populist has managed to impose his will on it.

There’s nothing new about the House and Senate GOP hurriedly blowing up a bill on Trump’s say-so that was headed for passage. That was the story of the 2018 shutdown and the border security legislation that Sen. James Lankford offered earlier this year. What’s new is having them blow it up on Elon Musk’s say-so.

And it was, almost certainly, Musk rather than Trump who detonated Johnson’s bill, despite the fact that the two Jokers ended up holding the same position. “We’re told that Trump’s team was aware of the contours of the deal and did not object,” Politico reported on Thursday. “And we’re also told Republicans passed off the details of the deal to those close with Trump.”

Trump’s team is doing their best today to save face, suggesting to Axios that Musk’s demagoguery was part of a novel strategy to inundate House Republicans with “instant and overwhelming feedback” on legislation. But that’s nonsense, obviously: Trump has been offering “instant and overwhelming feedback” on social media since the day he became a presidential candidate nine years ago.

What really happened here, in all probability, is exactly what it looks like. Musk wanted to flex his populist muscle by inciting a grassroots rebellion against Johnson’s bill, and he succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard and feared ending up on the wrong side of it. It wasn’t just congressional Republicans this time who were politically intimidated into abandoning a bill they supported. It was Trump himself.

The obsequiousness that some GOP members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader. “My phone was ringing off the hook. The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk,” crowed Rep. Andy Barr. After Musk replied to a Twitter follower who blamed Rep. Dan Crenshaw for the congressional pay raise in the bill, Crenshaw corrected him—while carefully prefacing his response with “I love you Elon.” Sen. Rand Paul proposed formally replacing Johnson with Musk, reminding followers that the speaker needn’t be a member of the House.

Never before in the Trump era has another populist commanded the political and financial capital needed to credibly threaten Republican politicians into doing his bidding. This is entirely new.

Knowing how fragile Trump’s ego is, Democrats relished the opportunity to needle him about being usurped by his ally. References to “President Musk,” “President-elect Musk,” and “Shadow President Musk” circulated on Twitter. Rep. Dan Goldman earned points for creativity by describing Trump as Musk’s “chief of staff.” AI images popped up of Musk pulling the strings of a Trump puppet and leading Trump around by a dog leash.

The two Jokers who now rule America are both narcissists of historic proportions. They can’t share a spotlight comfortably forever, so eventually they won’t. We can only wonder what will happen if President Trump declares at some point that cutting more spending or deporting more illegal immigrants or adding new tariffs is infeasible—only to have Speaker Musk accuse him of “selling out” and call upon The People to apply pressure.

For the first time, there’s a possibility that Trump will be out-Trumped.

Conflicting interests.

There was something else unusual in seeing Musk lead a populist uprising against the House bill. Uncharacteristically, Trump is the more sober political actor in this case.

His demand to eliminate the debt ceiling may have come belatedly, but it’s not unreasonable. For 15 years, fiscal hawks have been threatening not to raise the ceiling without meaningful spending cuts in return but have never followed through, knowing that doing so might crash America’s creditworthiness. Repealing a statutory mechanism that ideologues regularly use to take the Treasury hostage while achieving nothing, needlessly spooking markets in the process, is sensible policy.

And yes, it is ironic that a man who’s held the Republican Party hostage for nearly a decade would find himself so opposed to hostage-taking.

But Trump’s interest in ending the debt ceiling isn’t actually belated. Per Politico, he’d been leaning on Johnson since the election to deal with it now so that it doesn’t bedevil him next summer when he’s president. He backed off, it seems, once he realized there was little the speaker could do to make it happen. The House Freedom Caucus wouldn’t have gone along (some of them have never voted to raise the debt ceiling), which would have forced Johnson once again to make concessions to Democrats to get it done. Democrats would have wanted a lot in return, and the more they got, the more Republican votes Johnson would have risked losing.

Trump understood, it appears, that it was better for the House GOP to pass a bad spending bill than to force a shutdown that would leave the party with few ways out. After all, if the government shutters, Democrats will have no reason to bail Republicans out by supplying votes for Johnson’s next spending proposal. They had a deal with him on the current bill, on which he’s now reneged, and they’re about to lose control of Congress and the White House. There’s no incentive for them to ensure that the government is running smoothly when Trump takes office.

Democrats are happy to let a shutdown happen and force Republicans to somehow find the votes to end it when they take over the Senate on January 3. And that’ll be easier said than done thanks to the recalcitrance of the Massies and Roys on the one hand and the reality of a Senate Democratic filibuster on the other.

By biting his tongue about the bill for weeks, Trump was bowing to that political reality—until Wednesday night, when Musk boxed him in by tanking the legislation. Once it was going down anyway, there was no longer any point in restraining himself about the debt ceiling.

For once, his behavior is understandable. But what about Elon’s? What was his motive in blowing up the House deal?

Ostensibly it was about spending. He’s the co-chair of DOGE, isn’t he? In theory, flogging the House GOP over a minor short-term funding bill like this one was him firing a shot across their bow, showing what awaits them politically if they don’t get serious about budget-balancing next year. Musk is supposed to be a “disruptor” in his new position. Well, he disrupted.

I don’t think that’s primarily what he was up to, though. I think he was on a power trip. He’s gained an enormous amount of cultural influence over the right in a short period of time, far more than prominent officeholders like J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis. He was probably curious to see what he could do with it. Could he actually blow up important federal legislation with a tweetstorm, a feat only Trump himself has managed in the past?

He could. Tanking the bill was Elon’s show of political force to congressional Republicans, a warning that they serve two masters now. If it were simply about spending, he wouldn’t have posted so manically about it or thrown his weight around so aggressively by threatening supporters with electoral retaliation. (He can afford to make good on those threats, needless to say.) And he certainly wouldn’t have been so sloppy about attacking the legislation for things it doesn’t actually do or say.

His tenure as grand poobah of Twitter has been an endless horror show about an immensely powerful man getting sucked ever deeper into red-pilled online culture and hopelessly addicted to populist validation. On Wednesday he went on the sort of demagogic bender about a Republican spending bill that anyone who’s followed right-wing social media “influencers” since 2010 is very familiar with—except, in this case, the influencer in question commands a following so large and ardent that he can move Congress itself with tweets. Only one other person in America can say the same.

Trump wanted the government up and running, Elon didn’t care. Trump was fine with the deal Johnson made with Democrats, Elon wasn’t. The two Jokers’ interests conflicted. Elon won. Interesting, as Musk might say.

A Democratic opportunity.

The story of the year in politics is that Democrats have “lost touch” with the working class. They urgently need to rebuild their populist bona fides before Republicans lock down the blue-collar vote for a generation.

An opportunity has now been gift-wrapped for them. If they can’t get a bit of traction from this episode, they’re so hopeless that the party should disband.

Elon Musk isn’t any ol’ Trump crony, of course. He’s the richest person who’s ever lived. His net worth is approaching half a trillion dollars. His fortune has grown so vast that by some estimates it exceeds Jeff Bezos’ and Mark Zuckerberg’s combined. And if you had to bet on which of those three will fare best financially during Trump’s second term, you’d bet on Elon, of course. He’s the one who’ll be a major player in government for the next four years, well-positioned to push policies that stand to benefit his companies.

The richest person in history is the same guy who’s trying to browbeat Congress into shutting down over the holidays, knowing that will mean some government workers missing paychecks, disaster relief being held up, and potentially the entire economy slowing down. Musk isn’t hiding his callousness about it either: When some fans tweeted at him that they’re hoping for a shutdown, he responded enthusiastically.

Even for a free-marketeer like me, the spectacle of a guy worth $450 billion egging on federal dysfunction because he’s jonesing on all the “likes” and “retweets” it’s bringing him is grotesque. It has the air of a prank. When you have so much money that you’re bored with the perquisites of extreme wealth, you might amuse yourself by throwing your country’s government into needless chaos without a care for how doing so will affect the average Joe.

That’s next-level Gilded Age decadence. Thomas Nast would need a wall-sized canvas, not a newspaper page, to capture the magnitude of it.

Some Democrats have noticed. After Johnson’s bill crumpled under pressure from Musk, Rep. Jamie Raskin complained of “an oligarchy—a handful of wealthy people run everything and everyone is supposed to live in fear of them.” Sen. Bernie Sanders wondered whether his Republican colleagues would kiss the ring of “the richest man on Earth, President Elon Musk” and warned that billionaires must not be allowed to control the government.

Billionaires do control it, though. And the more they use their influence to shaft the working stiffs that Trump supposedly worries about, the easier it should be for Democrats to get another look from downscale voters whom they’ve alienated.

But who knows? The absurdity of history’s richest man becoming a populist hero on par with Trump doesn’t bode well for the American people’s ability to be roused against oligarchy. And Democrats haven’t been great so far at convincing the public to oppose government by Joker: They barely beat Trump in 2020 and failed miserably in 2024, when they had a coup plot and dozens of criminal charges to use against him.

At this stage of American decline, the public might actually prefer to be ruled by two Jokers rather than one.

If nothing else, though, the next four years will have moments of real amusement as the two try and fail to coexist and critics taunt Trump relentlessly about “Shadow President Musk.” (His spokesman has already felt obliged to issue a statement about it.) The fact that congressmen are having angry arguments online with “Catturd” is a nice mood-setter for what’s to come. Trump’s first term resembled the first Joker movie inasmuch as it was menacing and more or less functional. With Elon aboard, his second one might resemble the sequel—an unholy, comically embarrassing mess.