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'President Musk' Trends After Trump's Top Oligarch Torpedoes Federal Spending Deal
"Welcome to the Elon Musk presidency," wrote Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia.
Dec 19, 2024
Congress is careening toward a government shutdown after U.S. President-elect Trump, egged on by billionaire Elon Musk—who helped bankroll Trump's reelection campaign and is slated to help oversee cuts to government spending and regulation in the new administration—torpedoed a federal spending bill that would have kept the government open for the next few months.
The episode has drawn sharp rebuke from Democrats, and caused a number to muse whether it's Musk who's really in charge.
"The U.S. Congress this week came to an agreement to fund our government. Elon Musk, who became $200 BILLION richer since Trump was elected, objected. Are Republicans beholden to the American people? Or President Musk? This is oligarchy at work," wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in a social media post late Wednesday.
During a Wednesday night appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) called Musk "basically a shadow president."
These sorts of remarks continued Thursday, with Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) writing: "Welcome to the Elon Musk presidency, where Donald Trump is now clearly the vice president. They want a government shutdown that would hurt millions of Americans. It’s totally insane," wrote Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich echoed this sentiment in an opinion piece for Common Dreams published Thursday, writing: "If this isn't oligarchy, I don't know what is. You may not get access to services you depend on just before the holidays because an unelected billionaire shadow president wanted it that way."
[Related: If Musk Blocking a Key Spending Bill Isn’t Oligarchy, I Don’t Know What Is ]
Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance threw cold water on the spending bill Wednesday afternoon with a joint statement, arguing that the bill included "DEMOCRATIC GIVEAWAYS." The directive from Trump came after Musk spent much of Wednesday airing his opposition to the spending package on the platform X, which he owns. In total, Musk shot off over 150 posts demanding the members of the GOP back away from the spending bill, according to The New York Times.
The bipartisan spending package unveiled by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday would have funded the government at current levels through March 14, and also provided some $100 billion for disaster relief as well as $10 billion in economic relief for farmers.
In their statement denouncing the bill, Vance and Trump also called for an increase to the debt ceiling—adding the fraught issue of national debt, which currently stands at more than $36 trillion, into the debate. Trump also called for getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely, according to Thursday reporting from NBC News.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said this of the debt ceiling demand: "Ha! Trump wants to lift the debt ceiling for one reason and one reason only—so he can borrow shitloads of money to afford his new giant tax break for billionaires and corporations. In other words, saddle regular Americans with mountains more debt so the rich can get richer."
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Lina Khan Is Big Tech's Worst Nightmare—Here's Why She Should Stick Around
You know you’re making an impact when you’re challenging the status quo and ruffling feathers on both sides of the aisle. Regardless of Trump's arrival, she should stay at the FTC as long as she possibly can.
Dec 18, 2024
This month, the FTC opened an investigation into tech giant Microsoft, which some have called Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s “last swing” at Big Tech before her term concludes. But if you think Khan is slowing down, think again. Pencils-down orders be damned, Khan is sprinting through the tape, continuing her fearless crusade to rein in Silicon Valley’s excesses.
But who says her term is over? There are no laws requiring an agency Chair to resign from her post—it’s tradition. While her term expired this fall, she can remain on the Commission until her replacement is confirmed. After President-elect Trump’s norm-shattering run for president, followed by an array of questionable cabinet appointments, why are Democrats so obsessed with tradition? During this transition, it feels like we’re playing checkers when we should be playing chess. Here’s where we start.
We need a warrior like her to continue this fight, and we hope she does.
Given the uncertainty about what’s ahead, we strongly encourage FTC Chair Lina Khan to remain on the Commission. By staying, she could prevent Republicans from gaining a majority for months and help ensure she remains a bulwark against any rollbacks to the FTC’s tough-on Big Tech approach. And if you listen to the rhetoric from Republicans and the president-elect himself, they would be lucky to have her.
Most consider it wildly out of the realm of possibility. They’ll say that the president-elect has already named FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson as Chair and nominated Mark Meador to fill Khan’s seat. Both have expressed concerns about market power, but will they be as aggressive?
They’ll point to Trump confidant and billionaire Elon Musk’s tweet that Khan “will be fired soon.” But that’s the beauty of an independent agency. Khan can’t be fired or forced to resign without cause. Does that matter to the incoming president-elect? Probably not, but the courts could be an important backstop. In the meantime, she can continue to serve until Mr. Meador is confirmed.
My question to the American public is this: why change the driver in the middle of the proverbial antitrust highway? During Khan’s tenure, the FTC has faced down tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, banned almost all noncompetes, sued to prevent grocery heavyweight Kroger from acquiring Albertsons, and stopped Nvidia from attempting a bloated merger. Under her leadership, the FTC has investigated and sued more than three dozen merger proposals and racked up a long list of accomplishments.
This isn’t to suggest that Khan’s achievements are only popular on one side of the aisle.
Vice President-elect JD Vance has not been shy about his approval of Khan’s leadership, previously saying, “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” While pro-business conservatives have accused her of “overstepping,” those Republicans are out of touch with the voters who put the president-elect back in power. Even some liberals have called her a “dope.” But as the saying goes, you know you’re making an impact when you’re challenging the status quo and ruffling feathers on both sides of the aisle.
There’s a real threat that the new administration’s anti-Big Tech rhetoric from the campaign trail will fizzle out, and CEOs will work quickly to rebuild bridges with the president-elect. It’s rare for a new administration to alter the course of ongoing antitrust cases significantly. However, what could change significantly are the remedies the government seeks for companies found guilty. If you agree that the only remedy for companies like Apple and Google is to be broken up, we need Lina Khan to stay.
She deserves to finish the job she started. Her work has benefited consumers, competition, and the country at large. We need a warrior like her to continue this fight, and we hope she does.
Chair Khan, your move.
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We Should Take Trump’s Desire to Serve a Third Term Seriously
Why should we expect the Supreme Court to step in and declare Trump ineligible to run in 2028 if the court refuses to enforce a state’s decision to remove him from the ballot under the insurrectionist clause of the 14th Amendment?
Dec 12, 2024
If we have learned anything about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump over the past decade, it’s that even his most outlandish threats against democracy should be taken seriously. This applies not only to his promises to exact revenge and retribution on his political opponents and critics, but also to his expressed interest in serving a third term (or more) as president.
Trump has been musing about serving three terms for a long time. In a 2018 fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Chinese President XI Jinping for being elected president for life, calling Xi “great,” and suggesting, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” At a campaign rally in Wisconsin in August 2020, he declared: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”
There is no reason to think Trump’s MAGA base would raise any objections to keeping their dear leader in power.
His latest remarks on the subject were delivered on November 13, when he told a gathering of House Republicans, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure out something else.’”
Although widely characterized as a joke, the third-term talk cannot be dismissed as just another zany part of Trump’s rambling standup schtick that has seen him praising Hannibal Lecter, extolling the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and condemning windmills for driving whales crazy. Nor can it be taken for granted, as is commonly done, that the 22nd Amendment would preclude Trump from securing a third stint behind the Resolute Desk.
The 22nd Amendment provides:
No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once.
By its terms, the amendment prohibits presidents from being elected more than twice. It is silent as to whether a president can legally assume office more than twice by other means.
The distinction is critical because the hardcore reactionaries who dominate the Supreme Court, where any 22nd Amendment challenge involving Trump would wind up, consider themselves to be strict “textualists.” This means that they profess to focus on the plain meaning of the words contained in the Constitution, regardless of the practical consequences. As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it in her October 2020 Senate confirmation hearing: “I interpret the Constitution as a law and… I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
The exact meaning of the 22nd Amendment, however, has been the subject of academic debate since the measure was ratified in 1951. In a 1999 law review article published well before Trump became a reality TV huckster much less a presidential hopeful, legal scholars Bruce Peabody and Scott Gant argued that a twice-elected president would not be prohibited from joining a new electoral ticket as a vice presidential candidate, and if elected, would not be precluded from ascending to the presidency if the head of the ticket subsequently died or resigned.
Given the degeneration of the Republican Party into a cult of personality, it is not at all unthinkable that if Trump is still physically fit in 2028 that he and JD Vance could switch places on the GOP ticket, with the goal of having Vance elected and then stepping down to allow Trump to return to the helm. There is nothing unconstitutional on its face about such a scheme. And there is no reason to think Trump’s MAGA base would raise any objections to keeping their dear leader in power.
A less likely route back to the Oval would be for Trump to be elected speaker of the House, assuming there is a Republican majority in the lower chamber in 2029. The speaker is second in line to the presidency under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, and does not have to be a member of the chamber. There was considerable chatter in 2023 about Trump running for the speakership, and that talk could easily be revived to facilitate a third Trump term with the proper resignations of newly elected GOP stand-ins as president and vice president.
If both of those scenarios appear beyond reach, Trump could simply declare his candidacy for a third term and defy anyone to stop him. While such a move would be in direct conflict with the 22nd Amendment and would seemingly require the amendment to be repealed in the fashion of the 21st Amendment, which negated the 18th and ended prohibition, some pundits on the radical right are already agitating for “Trump 2028,” contending that the 22nd Amendment is inherently undemocratic and thus ripe for repeal.
But what if Trump, emboldened by a second term, decides to skip the laborious process of amending the Constitution altogether? Writing last February in the online journalLawFare, former associate White House counsel Ian Bassin asked why we should expect the Supreme Court to step in and declare Trump ineligible to run in 2028 if the court refuses to enforce a state’s decision to remove him from the ballot under the insurrectionist clause of the 14th Amendment.
The insurrectionist clause is simple and straightforward, and appears tailor-made for Trump, stipulating that “No person shall … hold any office… under the United States… who, having previously taken an oath… to support the Constitution… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”
Bassin’s article was published a month before the Supreme Court answered his question with its disastrous and hypocritical ruling inTrump v. Anderson that overturned Colorado’s decision to deny Trump a place on its 2024 presidential ballot. The court held that only Congress could enforce the insurrectionist clause. And even then, the court explained, Congress would have to enact a new statute to authorize the removal of an insurrectionist.
Prior to Anderson, a broad array of constitutional law experts, including liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe and retired conservative federal judge J. Michael Luttig, had argued that the insurrectionist clause was “self-executing” and required no enabling legislation, but only action by the courts for implementation. The Supreme Court slammed the door on this argument in Anderson, while potentially opening another on the self-executing nature of the 22nd Amendment in a future case.
Even if the Supreme Court were to rule against a Trump third-term bid, what would stop Trump from just ignoring the court’s commands? As Alexander Hamilton wrote long ago in Federalist Paper No. 78, “The judiciary… has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”
Both Andrew Jackson (in a case involving the seizure of Native American lands) and Abraham Lincoln (on habeas corpus) defied the Supreme Court. Trump would no doubt love to outdo them both.
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