Musk's new way to govern the country

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Dec 19, 2024 View in browser
 
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By Derek Robertson

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President-elect Donald Trump walks with Elon Musk (left).

President-elect Donald Trump walks with Elon Musk before the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, on Nov. 19, 2024. | Pool photo by Brandon Bell

Elon Musk is doing exactly what a lot of observers worried (or wondered, or hoped) he would do when he jumped into politics this year: governing via X.

With a flurry of posts yesterday he helped derail Congress’ deal to avert a government shutdown, seemingly even forcing Trump’s hand on the issue.

At first it might just look like a new billionaire pulling the same old trick Donald Trump invented back in 2016, using Twitter to jawbone his enemies, surprise even his allies, and harangue Washington until he gets what he wants.

But what Musk is doing is also new, with unpredictable power — an emerging form of governance that the world has genuinely never seen before. In buying the platform, shaping it around his ideas, and tweaking the system to boost his own voice, Musk has effectively become X. It bends to his ideas, and attention and power flow around him — and the platform shapes him as well. Its feedback loop, algorithmic incentives and populist bent have transformed Musk, and are still transforming him in ways that are hard to predict.

Now, they’re seemingly transforming America too.

Trump used Twitter to amplify, with great skill and at deafening volume, the exact set of views he’d been peddling since the 1980s — tough-on-crime, trade-skeptical politics, delivered in his unmistakable bullying, preening style.

Musk, on the other hand, is a political chameleon. He’s undergone a political evolution that’s played out in public via his incessant posting on X, and he now personally embodies its inchoate, reactionary political ecosystem.

More and more, he’s using that ecosystem to govern in all but writ. Starting yesterday, and with seemingly no sign of abating, the mogul used his social media platform to successfully whip up opposition to Congress’ planned continuing resolution to fund the government, which is now in danger of missing its deadline tomorrow and spurring a shutdown (although a deal was reportedly struck just before this newsletter's publication).

Still, with a single post (and then a dozen, and then several dozens and counting) Musk turned what had been a minor issue for hardcore fiscal hawks into an existential flashpoint, complete with credible threats of primary spending against those who oppose him.

John Ganz, author of this year’s “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” made a provocative one-to-one comparison in a blog post this morning titled “Elon Musk is Ross Perot on Crack.” Musk’s drug habits aside (we can assume he prefers ketamine or marijuana), it’s a revealing comparison, and not just because the two share a penchant for geopolitical freelancing.

Like Perot, Musk thinks that the government should be run more like a business and promises massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy — in this case through DOGE. His pressure on the CR is just another plank of his core austerity platform as he uses X to protest what he sees as an irresponsible spending spree.

But the way he’s enforcing it reveals the unique, unpredictable power of his social media-driven influence.

POLITICO’s Inside Congress published last night an enumeration of the many misconceptions, misunderstandings, and outright lies in Musk’s railing against the CR, but the veracity or even the actual outcome of his protest is almost beside the point. In Ganz’s post on Musk and Perot, he references a 1992 report from The New Republic’s Sidney Blumenthal, who described a scheme hatched by Perot to supplant Congress with “electronic town halls,” which would be used to assign tax power and priorities: “Thus the Madisonian system would be replaced by the Geraldo system; checks and balances by applause meter,” Blumenthal wrote.

Ganz, who has insisted at length on the validity of characterizing Trump’s movement as fascist, uses this to advance his argument by pointing out that the plebiscite has been the dictator’s best friend from Napoleon to Adolf Hitler. That issue aside, however, there’s a unique quirk that distinguishes Musk from his fellow claimants of the vox populi: Musk has a far more credible claim to embody that vox populi, as the owner, operator, and a staggeringly high-volume poster on the social media platform he’s used to marshal popular support against the CR.

So what does it mean for a populist political leader — as, make no mistake, Musk is now, just like Trump — to enjoy that level of oneness with the digital platform that gives him his power?

Musk’s political beliefs as expressed, and seemingly formed, over the past few years during which he purchased X tend to straightforwardly reflect the firebreathing conservative populism that’s always characterized the online right wing.

That low-tax, anti-LGBTQ, anti-DEI political cocktail is familiar to anyone who’s turned on Fox News in the past decade, much less spent a fair amount of time on X. As Musk has become more pointedly conservative and his social media use has grown, that same platform has given him an instrument to encourage the extreme austerity measures he’s always employed at his companies, even when he was still somewhat of a liberal hero.

Musk’s synthesis with the right-wing media ecosystem on X allows him to do the same thing Trump did back when it was still called Twitter: use it to make the GOP govern his way, with his viral reach an implicit endorsement from the masses to whom Trump owes his power. Musk isn’t the president, but he is now effectively governing by the same populist sanction with which Trump remade the GOP. As both the driver and a product of X, Musk represents a new form of personalized digital governance that Trump will find himself in competition with whether either man wants to acknowledge it.

 

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doge's hurdles

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have big ambitions for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but experts are skeptical it’ll wield much power.

POLITICO’s Victoria Guida wrote today in POLITICO Magazine about the limitations of the pair’s approach, starting with their lack of statutory authority: “They don’t have any authorities,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office who’s president of the American Action Forum, told Victoria. “On my most cynical days, I think they’re just a think tank, and I run a think tank. I know how little power I have.”

Victoria points out that even though Musk suggested the government should “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that, and many of DOGE’s other targets, would need Congressional action.

That will be easier said than done. Victoria points to an incident from Trump’s first term, when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suggested slashing about $18 million for the Special Olympics in 2019 and a revolt in Congress forced the administration to reverse course. “I have overridden my people,” Trump told reporters two days after a contentious House hearing. “We’re funding the Special Olympics.”

 

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no ai for eu

Mark Zuckerberg talks during the Meta Connect conference Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, California.

Mark Zuckerberg talks during the Meta Connect conference Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, California. | Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP

Mark Zuckerberg regrets that Meta isn’t deploying new AI tools in the European Union.

POLITICO’s Sam Clark reported today that Zuckerberg wrote on Threads that it’s “sad that I basically have to tell our teams to launch our new AI advances everywhere except the EU at this point.”

Zuckerberg was responding to Nick Clegg, Meta’s chief lobbyist, who posted about how the EU’s data protection regulation affects the company’s AI tools. He lamented that it’s taken “many months of unnecessary delay for regulators to approve the same legal mechanisms that the industry proposed at the start of this year.”

Threads, Meta’s platform that rivals X (née Twitter) was not originally available in the EU because of uncertainty over the bloc’s competition regulation known as the Digital Markets Act.

 

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whoa, canada

On today’s POLITICO Tech podcast, Steven Overly spoke with François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and industry, who said Ottawa has prepared a sales pitch tailored to the incoming Trump administration. Operative philosophy: on semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI for national security, “if you say no to Canada, you're saying yes to China.” Listen to the episode and subscribe below:

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