Donald Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk is showing no signs of fraying, even after at times he appeared to eclipse the president-elect’s influence as he bullied House Republicans into paring down their bipartisan spending deal to avert a government shutdown with just hours to spare.
The move by Musk to detonate the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb – by demanding that Republicans sink the deal or face a primary challenge – was viewed as a test run of the kind of role Musk might play to pressure Congress once Trump takes office, people familiar with the matter said.
Behind the scenes, even though Trump did not get his own demand for Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, the president-elect suggested Musk’s performance showed he could be a useful catalyst of activity once he takes office and leads the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”.
The consensus view at Mar-a-Lago was that Musk proved an effective cudgel to pressure Congress and a scapegoat for any backlash, the people said.
It appears to mark a shift in approach for Trump and could suggest he has become more savvy about the political process since his first presidency, when he routinely ran into legislative and optics hurdles as he pursued his agenda.
In 2018, Trump said he would be proud to shut down the federal government if he could not reach a deal with Democrats to include the funding that he wanted for his proposed wall along the US southern border.
“I’ll be the one to shut it down,” Trump boasted to reporters at the time, to the bemusement of then House speaker Nancy Pelosi and then Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “I will take the mantle. And I will shut it down for border security.”
The partial government shutdown that followed was the longest in US history, and Trump was caught off guard by the negative public reaction directed at him and his gambit, according to a former Trump White House official. Trump later backtracked on his border-wall funding demand.
This time around, Trump did not publicly back a shutdown himself, even if he privately remarked to aides that he did not mind if it occurred because it would technically happen on Joe Biden’s watch, the people said.
Instead, he left it largely to Musk to make the threat and receive the criticism, before House Speaker Mike Johnson put forward a narrower spending package that Democrats agreed to support just hours before the government was set to shut down.
But although House Democrats mocked Trump as acting like the vice-president with Musk as the president, in an attempt to get under his skin, the extended honeymoon between the two men has continued – in another notable shift for Trump, whose political alliances often lack for longevity.
In Trump’s first term, Trump parted ways with his chief strategist Steve Bannon after he was depicted in the media as the puppeteer of the Oval Office. (One Saturday Night Live skit featured Bannon as the grim reaper standing behind Trump and calling shots in the White House).
The same has not been true for Musk, the people said, mainly because the dynamics are different: as the world’s richest man, Musk has commanded special status with Trump, who has separately liked the idea of having him as his attack dog, while Bannon was always seen as a staffer.
Still, many House Republicans have been left deeply frustrated by what they see as Musk meddling in congressional affairs. Musk was not elected to any office and also bought his way into Trump’s orbit by spending roughly $250m to boost his presidential campaign.
Multiple members complained bitterly about Musk’s influence over them as they found themselves glued to his X account between spending-deal meetings in an acknowledgement that Musk’s willingness to drop colossal amounts of cash made his threats of primary challenges a legitimate concern.
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