After the Republican-led Congress passes a government spending bill but rejects a last-minute demand for a debt limit suspension from President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, we look at the richest man in the world’s growing influence, with The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. “At the end of the day, Musk got exactly what he wanted,” says Kuttner, referring to Musk’s influence in the removal of an anti-China trade provision in the bill. “It’s a classic case of Musk rolling Trump. … I don’t think this is going to end well.”This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the stopgap legislation passed Friday by the Republican-controlled House that averted a government shutdown and also rejected a last-minute demand for a debt limit suspension from President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, whom many are calling “President Musk.” Biden signed the measure Saturday morning.Funding for pediatric cancer research, that was cut from the final bill, was passed in the Senate as a separate measure after outrage over the move. The spending bill will keep federal funding at current levels through mid-March and provides $100 billion in disaster aid and $10 billion in assistance to farmers.It came after the original spending bill, based on Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s deal with Democrats, was rejected when Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk objected to it. Musk, the world’s richest man, warned on his platform X that any lawmaker who supported the spending bill, quote, “deserves to be voted out in two years.” And he said he would fund the primarying of those congressmembers. After the House voted to avert the government shutdown, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he thought both Trump and Musk were happy with it. SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: I was in constant contact with President Trump throughout this process, spoke with him most recently about 45 minutes ago. He knew exactly what we were doing and why. And this is a good outcome for the country. I think he certainly is happy about this outcome, as well. Elon Musk and I talked within about an hour ago, and we talked about the extraordinary challenges of this job. And I said, “Hey, you want to be speaker of the House? I don’t know.” He said this may be the hardest job in the world. I think it is. But we’re going to get through this. AMY GOODMAN: Well, meanwhile, in a speech at the conservative group Turning Point USA’s conference, called America First [sic], President-elect Trump tried to joke about how Musk had flexed his political power. PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: No, he’s not taking the presidency. I like having smart people. You know, they’re on a kick. “Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,” all the different hoaxes, and the new one is, “President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk.” No, no, that’s not happening. But Elon’s done an amazing job. Isn’t it nice to have smart people that we can rely on? AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Trump was addressing Turning Point in their conference, AmericaFest.For more, we’re joined by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. He has been following this story very closely. His recent piece, “How Musk Out-Maneuvered Trump.” His latest book, Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.Robert Kuttner, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, why do you think Musk outmaneuvered Trump here? And talk about what was passed.ROBERT KUTTNER: So, if you go back to last Tuesday, Johnson and the Democrats had agreed on a bill to continue funding the government, and it had about a hundred other bipartisan provisions in it, including — and this was the one that was most important to Musk — a provision that had been negotiated by Senator Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, and Senator Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, to limit high-tech investments in China for national security purposes. Now, it just happens that Elon Musk has factories Tesla in China and is planning AI in China, and a ban on high-tech exports would have really messed with this whole business strategy centered on China. It was at that point that Musk begins this Twitter storm of more than a hundred tweets warning that this bill is too expensive, that it’s outrageous, that it contains, you know, a 40% pay raise for Congress and a whole bunch of things that just weren’t true. This was all a smokescreen to get Congress to kill the bill because it had this China provision that would have cost Musk a lot of money. So, about 12 hours after that, Trump, who had been silent about the bill, clambers on board and says, “Yeah, this is a terrible bill, and you need to change it so that it includes a provision waiving the temporary debt ceiling.”Well, by Thursday, the bill was dead. They had to negotiate a whole new bill. And at the end of the day, Congress wanted to go home for Christmas, and so it passes overwhelmingly. But in the meantime, 38 Republicans had refused to get on board with this waiver of the debt ceiling. The Democrats were never going to give Trump that kind of leverage, so the Democrats were never going to vote for a waiver of the debt ceiling. Trump must have known that. End of the day, Musk got exactly what he wanted: The China provision was stripped from the bill. Trump did not get what he wanted: The waiver was not included in the bill. And so, it’s a classic case of Musk rolling Trump.And so, there are a couple of questions here. Is Trump aware of this? Is he whistling past the graveyard, as that comment suggested? He’s not stupid. He may be evil, but he’s not stupid. And he must know that Musk took him to the cleaners on this and that this is going to happen going forward, right? I mean, Trump is supposed to be some kind of a China hawk. So there are going to be all kinds of conflicts between what Trump wants to do and what’s good for Musk’s business interest. And these are both narcissistic guys. I argue that there’s room for only one scorpion in this bottle and that at some point Musk is going to overplay his hand and Trump is going to get sick of him.The other point I want to make is that the media, the mainstream media, completely missed this story. The mainstream media has played this as “Is Johnson in trouble?” and why the bipartisanship didn’t work and what that portends going forward. And not a single mainstream media outlet, with the exception of a kind of minor reference by E.J. Dionne and a very nice discussion of it by Heather Cox Richardson — the mainstream media did not touch this story at all. Politico had another characteristically stupid piece this morning on this is all about whether Trump can control Johnson. That’s not what it’s all about at all. A deal that included a waiver of the debt ceiling was never in the cards. There were never the votes for that. There were 38 fiscally conservative Republicans who weren’t going to vote for it. The Democrats were never going to vote for it. And by the way, the threat to primary those Republicans, most of those are in very, very safe seats. So, again, Musk is going to demonstrate that this particular threat is just idle bluster.And the other interesting thing here is that, unintentionally, this puts a little bit of spine in the Republican caucus in the House and the Senate. They’re willing to eat a lot of crow for Trump, but at some point even the spineless Republicans in the House and Senate get sick of being treated as nothing but rubber stamps.AMY GOODMAN: So, Robert Kuttner, talk about Democratic House leader — I mean, the leader of the minority — Hakeem Jeffries allegedly discussing permanently abolishing the debt ceiling. Can you talk about the significance of this discussion? And because it’s just referred to as the debt ceiling or eliminating it, explain exactly what it is.ROBERT KUTTNER: OK. So, in the early 20th century, legislation was passed requiring Congress to explicitly pass a law increasing the permissible amount of the national debt. Up until then, Congress could pass whatever it wanted to. And if Congress passed deficit funding and that temporarily increased the national debt, that was just the way it was. It was assumed that because Congress had voted to increase the deficit, and that temporarily increased the national debt, that took care of it. And then, during World War I, they decided — when the government was borrowing a lot of money to prosecute the war, they decided, no, there ought to be a separate vote extending the debt ceiling.And for a long time, this was just pro forma. And then, beginning in the ’80s and ’90s, Republicans used this as a cudgel to force — to threaten a government shutdown if Democrats would not cut particular spending programs. And for about 40 years, the ritual of, you know, “Are we going to fall off a cliff and shut down the government, or are they going to come to some kind of compromise and extend the debt ceiling?” that has been a part of American fiscal politics.So, at various points, various Democrats and various Republicans have said, “You know, this is silly. This is a distraction. Let’s get rid of it.” And when the Democrats have wanted to get rid of it, the Republicans have said, “Oh, no, no, no. We’re not going to give up that leverage,” and vice versa. So, in this context, when Trump is about to become president and Musk is talking about cutting $2 billion worth of social programs — there aren’t even $2 billion — trillion worth of social programs — tactically, this is not the moment for the Democrats to give this up. So, I think Jeffries sort of talked about this as part of some kind of grand bargain in the future, but not in this particular moment.AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what the Republicans cut out in the House — I mean, this astounding, what, $190 million for pediatric cancer research — and then what the Senate did to fix that? But what exactly this means?ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, there were about a hundred provisions, bipartisan provisions, that had been painstakingly negotiated in good faith, across the aisle, by Republicans and Democrats, that were part of the budget deal that Musk succeeded in killing. The Senate managed to restore, I think, four of them. They restored some farm relief. They restored some disaster aid. They restored some funding for pediatric cancer research. And I think there was one other relief measure. But the other 96 were on the cutting room floor. And those included, you know, a very small, token raise for Congress, I think cost-of-living raise of 2.5%. Musk, in his Twitter storm, described this as a 40% raise. And there were lots of good pieces of legislation, most important of which was this China provision, that, you know, people concerned with national security, exports of militarily sensitive technologies to China, have been trying to get for a long time. This is bipartisan. And that and all these other provisions were just left out of the bill, because the final bill was what’s called a continuing resolution: Let’s just fund the government at the same level until the middle of March. And then the Senate did succeed in restoring these three or four provisions.AMY GOODMAN: And I also wanted to ask you about Elon Musk and his interests here. I mean, if he wields this much power — and people talk about, “Well, he’s not even elected.” He doesn’t want to be elected, because he would have to abide by some conflict of interest laws. You’ve got him holding over $15 billion in federal contracts through SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink companies. Talk about the significance of this and how he benefits by what he pushes for.ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, the really interesting thing is if you can imagine Musk playing this game at Trump’s expense one time too often, and then you say to yourself, “OK, going forward, can Trump, like he’s done with so many other people, simply say, ’You’re fired,’ or does Musk have too much leverage over Trump? Or, conversely, does Trump have a lot of leverage over Musk?” So, if Musk became Trump’s enemy, that could do a lot of damage to Trump. On the other hand, Musk is dependent on all these government contracts. NASA has basically been outsourced to Musk, right? He makes a ton of money on all of these rocket launches through his company SpaceX.He also controls a lot of battlefield satellite technology on which the Pentagon is dependent. And that cuts both ways. A lot of people at the Pentagon think this is terrible. They want to come up with some other vendors, so they’re not so totally dependent on Musk, who sometimes has his own foreign policy. I mean, Ukraine battlefield communications were dependent on Starlink, and Musk started saying, “Well, I don’t like the fact that you’re doing this inside Russia, so maybe I’m not going to let you use Starlink.” So, not only does he have his own independent fiscal policy, he’s got his own independent foreign policy.So, if you play this forward, at some point Trump decides that, “Wait a minute, this guy has too much power. He’s upstaging me. He’s promoting some things that are at odds with my own agenda,” and then Musk can say, “Well, look, I’ve got six different ways that I can screw you.”And I was looking back at history. I could not find another single case in the entire annals of world history where another leader who had dictatorial ambitions put somebody who he didn’t control in such a position of power. So, I don’t think this is going to end well. And how exactly it ends will be fascinating to watch.And there’s useful collateral damage here, which, as I said a moment ago, is that Republicans in Congress, both the House and the Senate, you know, are getting a little bit weary of this, too. You don’t threaten 38 members of the Republican House, who have the safest Republican seats, without getting some kind of backlash. And you don’t appoint a clown car to key Cabinet offices without getting some kind of backlash even from Republican senators. So, you know —AMY GOODMAN: Bob Kuttner, I want to go to my last question, because we have to wrap in a minute. And that is the article you just wrote for American Prospect headlined “How AARP Shills for UnitedHealthcare,” in which you ask, “Why does the supposed advocate for the elderly steer them to the industry’s worst insurer?” In this last minute, lay out what you found.ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, it’s a very simple answer. They get a trillion — I’m sorry, they get a billion dollars a year in kickbacks from United. And if they were doing their job, they would do some research on seven or eight different insurers, and they would say, “Here are the pros and cons of this one and that one.” But the only insurance company that they are co-branded with is UnitedHealthcare. And they get about $250 million a year in dues. They get four times that in kickbacks from United. Some people might say this is a sham nonprofit. It’s really an insurance marketing scheme disguised as an organization for the elderly. And I’m going to be following up on that.AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bob Kuttner, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. We’ll link to your piece, “How Musk Out-Maneuvered Trump.” He’s also a professor at Brandeis University.When we come back, we’ll speak with a French journalist who says she found sisterhood as she covered the rape trial of Gisèle Pelicot. She’s the 72-year-old French woman whose landmark rape case galvanized France when she insisted on dropping her anonymity. On Friday, Pelicot’s husband Dominique and 50 other men were sentenced for raping her for more than a decade. Back in 20 seconds.The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
Not ‘going to end well’: DC insider on ‘a classic case of Musk rolling Trump’
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