Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Shephard: I think the shortest and most straightforward answer with Musk is that he’s having a tantrum and that he’s been kicked to the curb here. He had thought that he was going to be treated as this great savior who is reshaping not just the Republican party but the way that the federal government worked. I think that while, like I argued in my piece, there are various ways in which that is true, the big overarching idea that this was going to be some small-government revolution just hasn’t happened. So I think that the short answer here is that Musk has failed. He knows he has failed.
Sargent: So he went in there with DOGE and he was going to use his tech wizardry and use his band of young, brilliant guys to find all these cuts magically that would downsize the government and no one would notice it would be just made more efficient, right? And of course that didn’t happen because there isn’t a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. That’s the thing that they can never accept to be true. Musk discovered that, failed, and now he’s got to say that Republicans without him are just blowing up the deficit because they’re not doing what he said. That’s the size of it, right?
Sargent: It’s funny, I had forgotten about the “pedo guy” tweets, but we should have really recognized that there might be a problem with this guy. OK, so House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked to react to Musk’s criticisms on the bill. Johnson said he was really disappointed in Musk and he said the following.
Sargent: So it’s just a towering lie that this bill saves so much money. It would in fact add trillions to the deficit, again, partly because of the tax cuts for the rich. But that last part is the thing they cannot say. This is what both Musk and Mike Johnson have to deny. They just have to work their way around the fact that the center of this, which is that they want to cut taxes for the rich and they need to slash the safety net to do so. Alex, it looks to me like Mike Johnson knows Musk’s condemnation of the bill is a problem for Republicans. What do you think on that front?
I think one of the things that’s funny about this is that Musk and Johnson are both caught in the same rhetorical vortex. And as you previously said, they’re not actually talking about the substance of the bill, they’re both actually talking about two different fantasies of Republican government. On the one hand, this idea that you can just cut everything and that will make the country work and it will save it—that’s the Musk point of view. And Johnson is trying to explain the Trumpian version, which is that they’re doing all that Republican stuff. They’re redistributing wealth from the poorest people to the richest people, but actually all the benefits are being preserved and everything is great, and [they’re] bringing back factories. It’s both 1890 and 1955 again at the same time.
Shephard: It’s a bill also that increases defense spending, right? Which is the principal reason why Musk’s goal at DOGE failed—they never really got to touch the Pentagon budget at all and instead just pursued various liberal bugbears like USAID and other places. Again, it’s that they’re trapped in this big lie. I think Trump himself may not understand any of this or may not care at all, but there’s this fantasy that they’re pushing, which is, in some ways, the central fantasy of Trumpism itself: that they can pursue Republican ends by other means, that they can somehow cut taxes for the rich and not cut entitlement spending. What, I think, was the key to Trump’s success in the “blue wall” states in 2016 was the promise to not cut Social Security. But what we’re seeing now is that in power, Republicans are pursuing many of the same ends that they have since time immemorial—and they’re trying to sell it this way.
Sargent: Yeah. Speaking of that, we should clarify that Trump is just lying in saying they’ll only cut waste, fraud, and abuse. The bill would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and potentially knock 10 million off coverage. But I think what this shows also is that Trump has to simultaneously say it’s an enormous spending cut to hide the fact that it balloons the deficit in order to make the rich richer while also saying he isn’t touching Medicaid because that screws his own voters, right? So the only way out for them is to define those cuts to the safety net as merely cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. I think that’s going to be the route out for Republicans here, especially the Senate ones who seem to have a twinge of conscience about the Medicaid cuts. They’ll just tell themselves and the world that all they’re cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse, and they’ll accept the cuts to Medicaid. And that’s how we’ll get out of this. But I think Trump laid the whole scam bare in one tweet there.
Sargent: Yes, but without admitting a key component of the scam, which is that it’s really shaped around tax cuts for the rich, right? What Elon Musk is doing is pushing his own scam in which the only driver of deficits is runaway government spending and not tax cuts for the wealthy. Musk actually does harbor a pretty seriously plutocratic vision of what he wants the state to be, which is bankroll genius projects like his and just cut loose the global poor by ending USAID. And I think he would probably like to end Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, although I don’t know that for sure. He’s pushing his own ruse, his own bamboozlement—and yet at the same time, because he’s admitting that the bill balloons the deficit, which he’s doing for his own reasons to make the case that spending is bad, he actually unmasks the scam that Trump and Mike Johnson are pushing.
Sargent: And you have a grand theory of all this stuff that I think you wanted to tell us about. Why don’t you go into that?
The biggest part of this bill is the tax cut for the rich, but you’ve got to kiss the ring to Trump. I think Musk isn’t doing that, and what we’re seeing is this coalition that maybe not to his credit but Trump did successfully pull together to get elected start to crack again. And I think that could be really significant here, because Musk is threatening to not fund Republicans in the 2026 midterms. If he were to follow through on that, that would be significant politically. In any case, it shows that this current Trump administration, the coalition that he likes to boast about, was actually really held together by wire and string. We’re five months in, and it’s already fraying in a bunch of different ways.
Shephard: Yeah. And there’s another piece of this as well. I think one way that I’ve been understanding this version of the Trump administration is as this, I call it, shopping spree of chaos or destruction or kamikaze mission. Essentially, Trump and the people closest to him realized that they didn’t actually get that much done the first time around. And what we’re seeing particularly in the first five or six months is an effort to reshape as much of the country as humanly possible before enough endangered Republicans lose the political will to follow along.
Shephard: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Shephard: Yeah, I think that the cynical portion of me says that in some ways Musk has [done] those types of Republicans a favor. He’s given them a way out. They can just say, Look, I respect Elon and he did a lot of great work at DOGE, but he’s wrong about this, and the president is right. And the president is more popular with Republican voters and he’s more popular with general voters. Most likely what’s going to happen is they’re going to keep pushing this through. You’re never going to hear about the tax cut element. You’re just going to hear about this big gigantic bill that protects Medicaid and lowers the deficit. And then you start to say, Oh, [I] keep hearing all about this bill. What does it actually do? Where’s the money going? And they never tell you.
Shephard: It was great. This is fun.
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