Chaos Monkeys

More than meets the eye and at the same time so much less

Dec 24, 2024

One thing I think people are missing is the significance of the scene in the president-elect's box at the Army-Navy football game on December 14, where so many symbolic meetings seemed to be occurring, from Vice President–Elect Vance bringing killer Daniel Penny as his plus-one to the rival secretary of defense candidates Hegseth and DeSantis, but business appeared to be getting done in the deep conversations of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader–Designate John Thune. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, brought a small boy, one of his numerous progeny, but in many of the pictures he looked like a stranger trying to photobomb the event, lonely and wistful, with an oddly large head.

Photo by Getty Images via CBS News.

We know what Trump and the congressional leaders were talking about, and it wasn't Musk's many interesting plans for cutting government spending. It was the urgent continuing budget resolution they were planning to vote on in the House on Wednesday the 18th, to prevent a government shutdown on Friday, in fact, and Trump was pushing some new demands in the opposite direction; instead of the resolution they planned, to carry them just to March, forcing them to go through the same thing in a matter of a few months, he wanted them to extend spending out for a full year, until next December, which I think would have been impossible to manage before the deadline, and in addition he wanted them to include a provision suspending the debt ceiling, the thing Democrats usually have to beg Republicans to help them with, because the Republicans are so famously conservative about the national debt.

(The debt ceiling is currently suspended, under the terms of an earlier deal; that's not what would have shut the government down when the deal expired on January 1, but it will shut it down fairly soon, maybe mid-June, at current spending levels, so they most likely will need to re-suspend the debt ceiling, or eliminate it permanently as Trump apparently suggested in his conversation with Johnson and Thune.)

So my theory is Musk didn't enjoy this. His plan to cut two and a half trillion dollars from the national debt was not being taken seriously (he didn't actually have a plan, but everyone should have understood that he was so smart it would happen before you knew it). Trump was going ahead on the assumption that he'd be adding $7.7 trillion over the next ten years. Musk was being slighted.

So, naturally, when the actual text of the bill (without suspension of the debt limit) was posted on Tuesday he turned to Twitter (I still mostly call it Twitter), as one does, for comfort and assistance, essentially inviting followers to do his research for him, on how terrible the bill was

And they obliged with a torrent of misinformation, which he happily reposted all night long, as Brad DeLong writes,

Elon Musk falsely claimed that the bill would fund laboratory weapons to develop biological weapons—it would not: it would fund labs where any future plague could be contained and studied, for we were very lucky in that COVID-19 was not nearly as infectious as, say, Ebola and cannot count on being so lucky next time.
Elon Musk falsely claimed that each member of Congress would get a 40% pay increase—they would not: members of Congress are scheduled to get a 3.8% at most cost-of-living-increase whether or not the bill under consideration were to pass.
Elon Musk falsely claimed that the bill contained a $3 billion subsidy for a new NFL Washington Commanders stadium—it would not: the bill would transfer the site of RFK stadium, where no NFL team plays or has any plans to play (the Commanders play in Landover, Maryland) to the DC local government so that the site can be redeveloped (it is, after all only 4 miles from the White House).
Musk falsely claimed that the bill would block House Republicans from "investigating" Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee—it would not, and there is no non-deluded reason anyone should think it might: the House sets its own rules for what it can and cannot do in its internal procedures, and while those rules are sometimes incorporated into public laws, the House can of its own accord change those on its own whenever it wishes, and I have already been dragged down a misinformation rabbit hole because the bill under consideration does not change the House’s rules of procedure at all.
And more lies. And more lies. And more.

Upon which Trump himself took up opposition to the bill, going public on the debt ceiling "issue", the first time any of us realized he'd been thinking about it—he'd always encouraged Republicans not to lift the debt ceiling, throughout the Biden presidency, just to create more chaos. Now he was begging them to do it so the move wouldn't have his name on it, more or less openly:

"Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration?" Trump and Vance said in their statement. "Let’s have this debate now."

Until the Republican congressmembers were so freaked out that their majority vanished and the bill failed (it needed a two-thirds majority in the House because Speaker Mike Johnson feels he has to submit more or less everything under special rules to prevent his loony caucus from offering loony amendments to bring them down). A second slimmed-down bill, with some liberal kindness stripped out and a debt ceiling provision tacked on, failed utterly, with all the Democrats and quite a few Republicans voting against it; a third attempt, with the debt ceiling provision removed, passed on Friday in the House and the Senate, and went to Joe Biden for signature, averting the shutdown, so that's one catastrophe we can stop worrying about for another [checks notes] 12 or 13 weeks, till the next shutdown threat arrives on March 14.

While it was going on there was a good deal of talk over who was in charge among the Republicans. A number of Democratic politicians took to referring to "President Musk" as Musk seemed to have his own power base in the party distinct from, and sometime possibly more powerful than, the president-elect. Trump even felt forced to comment on that:

“All the different hoaxes, and the new one is, ‘President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk,’” Trump said to the crowd on Sunday. “No, no. That’s not happening.”

"I'm safe," he added, "and you know why? He can't be. He wasn't born in this country." But the issue wasn't who got the title and the special stationery; neither one of them is going to be president after the next presidential election, if there is one. It's who calls the shots. I'm not sure to what extent that's either of them. I have a lot of doubts as to how much influence Musk is going to have from his position in the "DOGE", if the only information he has access to is the stuff his Twitter followers send him, while Trump's position in the Oval Office has never depended on the information he has but chiefly on the force of his sheer stubbornness, but that seems to be failing, with his inability to get the House Republicans to do what he wants and the awful troubles he's been having with his nominees, like at least the extraordinarily slimy Matt Gaetz (of whose horrifying Ethics Committee investigation the report has just been released and Pete Hegseth, or recommendations, like his idea of filling incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio's Florida Senate seat with his daughter-in-law Lara, which has absolutely fallen through. (Pretty sure Gaetz isn't going to get that Senate seat either.)

Musk may have scored a big personal victory in the snafu over the continuing resolution if his real aim was, as David Dayen is saying at The American Prospect, to preserve and expand his Tesla operations in Shanghai against the Biden administration's efforts to refocus the EV industry on the US (the bill has dropped efforts toward prohibiting American investments in "sensitive technologies" in China, those involving semiconductors and artificial intelligence), but I don't know that it's a victory against Trump. Maybe for Peter Navarro, back from four months in prison this summer for contempt of Congress, who will be a "senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing" in the new administration. At the same time, I'm sure Trump and Musk hate each other.

My sense is that the White House is going to be more and more or a war zone in the coming administration, with its survivors from the previous Trumpery, its Russian-style oligarchs, its personnel from Trump's old gang life like Roger Stone and Boris Epshteyn, its weaklings like Mike Johnson from the evangelical movement, and so on. Bad things are already happening, and many worse things will undoubtedly happen after the inauguration, but I think there may be too many chaos monkeys for a properly constituted dictatorship.