Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes:

For almost a decade, conservatives have insisted that we should take Donald Trump seriously, not literally. But how seriously should we take Elon Musk?

Musk, who funnelled more than two hundred and seventy million dollars into Trump’s Presidential campaign, has become somewhat ubiquitous in the weeks since the election: co-chairing a budget-cutting advisory commission called DOGE, touring Congress, and vociferously supporting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, in Germany. Questioned about that last one—about his support for a party whose manifesto reads, in part, “Islam does not belong in Germany”—Musk replied, “The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office!” Was that literal? Serious or deliberately trolling? Sincere but underinformed?

This week, it has been the turn of conservatives to try to gauge Musk’s meaning and intent. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson had just about finalized a short-term agreement on government spending with the Democrats, who, until Inauguration Day, still run the White House. The idea was to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown and to insure that all the bills were paid through March, when Republicans would be back in charge. And, for the sake of political tranquility, Johnson made some minor concessions to the Democrats and attached a couple of bills with bipartisan support. But, on Wednesday, Musk unleashed a torrent of more than a hundred and fifty posts on X, the social-media platform he owns, denouncing the agreement, which had the effect of making it the main subject of the world. “Outrageous!” Musk wrote, retweeting a self-styled “Former Jan 6th Political Prisoner” who said the bill would allow Congress to block an investigation into the January 6th House select committee. “Unconscionable,” he wrote, about a claim that the stopgap spending bill would raise congressional pay by forty per cent. (The real figure was 3.8 per cent.) Many of the tweets took this form—a word of outrage, a furious emoji, regarding claims about the bill’s overreach or sheer length. But within a few hours the effect was clear. Republican congressmen started to reply to Musk on X, saying that he had persuaded them to turn against the bill. Not long after that, Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance released a joint statement with Trump denouncing the continuing resolution, which effectively killed it, and instead pushed for a “temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS.” The statement also said that Congress should raise the debt ceiling, something that Musk hadn’t mentioned. Then both Trump and Musk threatened representatives who opposed them with primary challenges—a suggestion, maybe, of how this kind of wealth in politics could change things, even just by being invoked. [Continue reading…]