Trump’s Billionaires and Hardliners Don’t Know or Care How Washington Works
And we’re all going to suffer the consequences.
A YEAR OF IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS about nothing had amounted to exactly nothing by the time former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov pleaded guilty this month to fabricating a pillar of the case against Joe Biden—that he and his son, Hunter, had each received $5 million bribes from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.
Talk about weaponizing the government, not to mention wasting its time and taxpayer money. I was prepared to give this outrage the attention it deserved when there came a twist that put Republican Rep. James Comer, ringmaster of the impeachment circus, in a different light. Turns out he worked with Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the capital’s non-voting House delegate, on a bipartisan deal to transfer the unused, 174-acre Robert F. Kennedy Stadium complex from federal to D.C. control.
I might have missed Comer’s role if Elon Musk’s disinformation barrage hadn’t imploded the big, bipartisan year-end government funding deal. The stadium transfer was collateral damage—until, in a seasonal miracle, the Senate brought it back from the dead at 1:15 a.m. the Saturday before Christmas.
For D.C. and its leaders, this is a chance to develop valuable land and possibly lure the Washington Commanders back to the capital with a new stadium. For Comer, it is a way to save federal money. Without his revitalization bill, he said, “this decaying land in D.C. would continue to cost taxpayers a fortune to maintain.”
Folks—and by folks I mean Donald Trump and Elon Musk—this is how you get things done.
“Bipartisan work is as basic as the American covenant, E pluribus unum, out of many, one,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, said recently on NBC’s Meet the Press. In 2022, he ran a memorable campaign ad about his unlikely work with conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on an interstate highway extension connecting military communities in their states. His tagline: “I’ll work with anyone if it means helping Georgia.”
It’s easier than you might think to find wildly disparate bipartisan partners in Congress. Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, the MAGA champion from Missouri, are another example. Just this month they challenged automakers’ opposition to people’s right to repair their own cars, and teamed up on a bill to rein in pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs, the middlemen who drive up drug prices).
Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, another bipartisan pair, began work in 2023 on how to screen and restrict sensitive U.S. technology investments in China and other countries of concern. The final version had broad support but, like the RFK stadium deal, was part of the negotiated bipartisan spending package that died.
Musk’s falsehood-fueled social media assault on his X platform dragged Trump into the funding fight and killed the 1,547-page bipartisan deal that House and Senate leaders had negotiated. Trump’s insistence on raising the debt limit then killed a second, 116-page version. Congress finally passed a third version that left out the debt ceiling hike and a whole lot more.
Some bipartisan priorities—among them the RFK stadium deal and a child cancer research program—were later revived in separate votes. But others were not. Unfortunately for the country, the casualties included other health research (including much more child cancer funding), PBM provisions meant to lower drug prices, a ban on hotel and ticket junk fees, reauthorization of a U.S. agency that tracks and counters foreign disinformation, and the Cornyn-Casey attempt to keep sensitive U.S. technologies out of the wrong hands.
The big losers were consumers, public health, national security, and Trump. A higher debt ceiling would have made it easy for the president-elect to continue giving the rich huge tax cuts, and for America to borrow more money to offset the expected $4 trillion-plus revenue loss. Biden called it an “accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires,” and he wasn’t wrong.
By contrast, the big winner was Trump’s unelected billionaire sidekick. Musk—with his AI aspirations and his large, growing Tesla manufacturing presence in China—can keep investing wherever he wants, unfettered by the scrutiny and transparency that would have been required by Cornyn-Casey. And the disinformation agency he wanted gone, which he attacked last year as “the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation” and “a threat to our democracy,” has already shut its doors.
Musk’s success in protecting his own interests did not go unnoticed. “The Shanghai plant is Tesla’s largest car manufacturing facility—the Chinese gigafactory produced about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output over the last year,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. She suggested Musk’s China ties and investments could have been the rationale for his frenzied campaign to turn Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and other GOP leaders against “a bipartisan, bicameral negotiated funding deal that included this provision.”
In the MAGA tradition of sore winners, Musk attacked DeLauro as an “awful creature” who should be expelled from Congress. He clearly did not consider or care that they might agree on some future issue and she would be a useful partner. Like Trump, he sees politics as a zero-sum game, presidents as business owners, and Congress as employees.
Neither Musk nor Trump accepts that all members of Congress are election winners with constituents, concerns, and responsibilities of their own. They don’t understand House or Senate rules and cross-pressures, or the importance of trust among party leaders and negotiators. Nor do they tolerate compromise. They want to impose their will, period.
RONALD REAGAN ENTERED POLITICS after a career as an actor and union negotiator. When he became governor of California in 1967, Reagan wrote in his 1990 autobiography, he already understood the need for compromise—but “compromise was a dirty word” to the purists (the “radical conservatives,” in his phrase) who had supported him during his campaign. He told them it’s best to take what you can get and fight for the rest later, but they “never got used to it.”
The MAGA movement and the House Freedom Caucus aren’t used to it, either. And who expects Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their cosplay “Department of Government Efficiency” to get used to it, to pursue compromise? The idea is snort-worthy.
It’s hard to get to the finish line in Congress. The House, as former congressman Tim Ryan has said, “makes glaciers look like a NASCAR race.” And the Senate, I’d add, makes the House look like a rocket ship. Conditions are often conducive to brinkmanship, which means there is endless opportunity for the Musk-Trump wrecking crew.
In their first post-election, pre-inauguration outing, Trump and Musk not only blew up the carefully negotiated bipartisan funding agreement, they undermined the working relationship between Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Democrats helped Johnson keep his job in May, but when the House meets on January 3 to elect new leaders, “there will be no Democrats available to save him” if a few in Johnson’s tiny majority turn against him, Jeffries said on MSNBC. The problem, from Jeffries’s perspective: Johnson walked away from a deal, breaking his word, and did Trump’s bidding without talking to Democrats.
Do your own job, or bow to the billionaires? Accept compromise as a fact of political life, or hold the country hostage to the whims of the billionaires? That is the crux of the dilemma for all Republicans on Capitol Hill. In the next few weeks, we’ll learn a lot more about what to expect for the next four years. For better and for worse.
 | A guest post by
|