By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
It didn’t take long after Donald Trump’s election win before the tongues started wagging about just who is the real president. More than a few already had their answer. It wasn’t Trump.
The issue that prompted that answer was the demand that ostensibly came from Trump for House Republicans to torpedo the agreement brokered to keep the government operating for the short term with the looming risk of a partial government shut down.
The surface issue was that the spending measure was packed with way too much spending. Among the alleged profligate spending cited was $100 billion in support of disaster relief, economic aid for farmers, and federal aid to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.
But again, that was just the surface issue. There was a far more telling thing that stood out about the Trump attack on the short gap spending measure. There was some evidence that Trump had not made hammering the measure a priority in the weeks that House Republicans and Democrats agreed on the measure.
Mega billionaire Elon Musk changed that. He railed in a 70-post assault on the measure on X. “This bill should not pass,” was the gist of what he said.
He branded the spending bill as “packed with pork.” That was the buzz word for spending that was allegedly wasteful, unnecessary and that legislators stuffed into a spending bill for their pet projects in their districts. Musk didn’t stop by merely lambasting the measure. He issued a threat. Any Republican that backed the measure should be ousted from office in the 2026 primaries.
One obvious question is did Trump turn bellicose budget stymie warrior at Musk’s prodding. Or was this Trump making yet another nod to Musk’s seeming ever expanding power within the Trump orbit?
One Democratic congressperson had an answer.
“As the shadow president-elect, Elon Musk is now calling the shots for House Republicans on government funding while Trump hides in Mar-a-Lago behind his handlers,” warned New York Rep. Dan Goldman on X. He further warned, “It increasingly seems like we’re in for four years of an unelected oligarch running the country by pulling on his puppet’s strings.”
Goldman was far from the only congressional member who saw Musk’s not so hidden hand in the saber rattling against the congressional short term budget bill.
Hard line rightist Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley provided anecdotal confirmation by sort of pointing the finger at Musk. Hawley told an interviewer that Trump was “not read into this … and he’s just learning about it … he’s just reading about it.”
With Musk hammering away at the spending measure on X, Trump couldn’t avoid knowing about it and making it a contentious issue. Trump, though, was just one of many who piled in on condemning the spending bill after Musk launched his assault.
A wave of conservative commentators, and a widening pack of Republican House members and senators took their cue from Musk. They denounced it in almost the same almost line by line terms that Musk used to knock the bill. They added two more much larger criticisms.
The first was that the bill was a cave-in to Democrats’ supposed penchant for outsized spending on domestic programs. The second was that it was a naked betrayal of Trump’s long and loudly proclaimed promise to whittle down government programs and that primarily started with hacking away at spending.
Musk was back at it again on X. “No bills should be passed (by) Congress until Jan 20,” he wrote. That is when Trump would officially step back into the presidential driver’s seat.
Mercifully, House Republicans did show some common sense and rejected the Musk-Trump effort to torpedo the stop-gap spending bill and send the government into a downward spiral. It passed a last-minute funding measure. The Senate quickly approved it. And President Joe Biden immediately signed it.
Still, no matter whether Musk was just a “pawn” on Trump’s chessboard or had indeed become a major political player when it came to running the government, there are two irrefutable facts about Musk.
One, he has the proven ability to get a lot of people riled up about an issue that he feels strongly about to stir up an online backlash. Two, he has a bottomless treasure trove of cash, and he could if he so chose easily target Republican office holders for obliteration at election time.
As one GOP official privately summed it up, “No one wants to cross him.”
Musk heard the chatter, gossip and mockery of him as the real power behind the Trump throne. He wisely moved quickly to scotch that notion.
When Trump claimed victory in scuttling the spending bill, Musk immediately tweeted, “I’m not the author of this proposal. Credit to @realDonaldTrump, @JDVance & @SpeakerJohnson.”
That was public acknowledgement from the anointed “shadow president” of just who the real boss was. More than a few were not convinced.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “Day 1: The Trump Reign” (Middle Passage Press). He is the host of the weekly The Hutchinson Report Facebook Livestreamed.
