The Shadow President Taking Over Our Lives
Elon Musk is everywhere these days, steering Congress, tanking U.S. budgets, cutting services and safety rules, talking with Putin and Iran. Maybe we shouldn't have elected him. Oh, right, we didn't!
You might recall, or at least have heard about, the old-time radio show titled, “The Shadow,” a character originally played by the multi-talented Orson Welles.
If you do, maybe you remember its theme: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” Now, we have a new type of shadow, a shadow president, and Elon Musk apparently knows what lurks in the heart of Donald Trump — a $277 million contribution to his campaign — and in the hearts of the frenzied, far-right MAGA minions in the U.S. House.
This week our shadow president took it upon himself to lead a revolt against a bipartisan funding bill designed to bankroll the government through to mid-March. In doing so, he directly challenged the authority of House Speaker Mike Johnson and others in the Republican leadership who helped craft the measure, working with the Democratic leadership.
Without such a bill the government will shut down at midnight. As of 8 a.m. this morning, the initial agreement was scrapped and there was no other plan approved.
Musk first announced his opposition to the funding resolution at 4:15 a.m. on Wednesday and then — according to various media reports — repeated it throughout the day with between 70 and 100 tweets on X, the social media site he owns. Musk was followed 13 hours after he started ranting by the president-elect, with Trump coming across as the younger brother you see hustling to keep up with an older brother so he doesn’t get left behind.
Musk, meanwhile, argued that Republicans should leave the government shut down until at least Jan. 20, when Trump takes office.
The question left unanswered: Who answers to who? Did Trump jump in because of Musk’s fusillade of complaints, or is Trump just a little slower on the trigger these days?
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, seemed particularly sensitive to this question. “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view,” Leavitt said in a statement sent to Business Insider. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
Full stop, huh? I bet if she delivered that statement in person, she would have been scowling as she said it.
Leading the jeering on the Democratic side was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. “Democrats and Republicans spent months negotiating a bipartisan agreement to fund our government. The richest man on Earth, President Elon Musk, doesn’t like it,” Sanders wrote on X, adding, “Will Republicans kiss the ring? Billionaires must not be allowed to run our government.”
Has an unelected billionaire been crowned co-president by the Republican Party, as Sanders suggests? It kind of seems so, and it only cost Musk what he spent to help put Trump in office. That’s pocket change for a guy worth $446 billion, according to the latest estimate by Bloomberg News.
Beyond Musk’s apparent ability to make Congress go belly up, he’s also put himself in a position to drive huge cuts in government spending and inserted himself into some of the world’s most combustible political conflicts with his one-on-one meetings and discussions with Iranian officials and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
In his talks with the Iran representatives, Musk was reported to have discussed ways to defuse tensions between that country and the U.S. He’s had regular contact with Putin since late 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 26. Their conversations, the paper reported, have been wide-ranging, touching on personal issues, business and geopolitics.
Excuse me, but doesn’t this sound kind of presidential to you? What’s going on here?
Musk has never held political office and, according to research by NBC News, he’s rarely even voted until recently. But his political influence seems to be growing by the day, driven by the combination of his massive wealth, his online celebrity, his ownership of unique news-maker companies and his monetary and personal support for Trump’s political comeback.
The so-called “robber barons” that controlled American life from about 1865 to 1900 earned that sobriquet by suppressing wages and ignoring the rights of the working man, pillaging rivals and corrupting government. Now the label can legitimately be used once again.
So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration, making it the richest in history, by a good amount. He’s got Musk, the world’s richest person, in his corner and other billionaires — from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch — have been lining up to pay homage. Why do you think that may be?
I’m a big fan of Robert Reich, who worked in both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Today, he wrote on Substack that it’s now the third time in U.S. history that a small group of hyper-wealthy people hold political power. The goals of this group aren’t to help the working class, it’s to get their own taxes lowered, to kill off antitrust enforcement, and to water down labor protections for the people who work for them.
“The biggest divide in America today is not between ‘right’ and ‘left,’ or between Republicans and Democrats,” Reich writes. “It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The old labels — ‘right’ and ‘left’ — prevent most people from noticing they’re being shafted.”
Thankfully, Reich defined the word “oligarchy” for me, since I always have to look up the fancy political labels Democrats like to throw around. Oligarchy, he writes, “refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives.”
Welcome to the new America, where two billionaires, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will determine what the government spends money on and what it will regulate, and where other billionaires bend coverage of newspapers and TV to their own political benefit. In this America, which began expanding under Ronald Reagan, the gap between the top 1% of Americans and the rest of us has become huge and it’s growing.
Those in the top 1% represent just 1.3 million people within a population of 335 million. But they hold more wealth than the entire middle class combined, according to the Federal Reserve. These are the people Trump cares about the most, not the rest of us, no matter what he said on the campaign trail.
Like Trump, Musk comes from a wealthy family. But unlike Trump, he can never run for president because he wasn’t born in the U.S., thus his apparent push to become America’s shadow president.
Musk grew up in South Africa as the son of an emerald dealer and property developer. He became a millionaire in his late 20s after starting, and then selling for $307 million, an online telephone directory in which most of the initial cost was covered by his father, according to news reports.
Since then, he’s leveraged the millions he gained from that sale by founding or investing in a variety of forward-thinking tech companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, now rebranded as X. You have to wonder if he’s leveraged millions this year to get Trump on his side in a push to take over how our government is run in a “shadow” capacity.
“The Shadow” in the original show had the power to cloud men’s minds, and he packed a pair of automatic pistols in case some less mystical option was called for. Musk is using X, the social media he owns, to cloud the minds of the Republicans now in power and the weapon he’s packing is his net worth.
After Musk poured hundreds of millions into his effort to get Trump re-elected, he suggested to Trump that he be put in charge of developing plans to cut back both government spending and the regulations that slow business development, a presidential-level task of sorts. Now set in that role, he says he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government’s $7 trillion budget.
If so, it’s a move with the potential to affect all Americans in one way or another.
Wealthy execs and their corporations, no longer facing common sense regulations, could see higher profits and pay, even as Trump moves to cut their taxes once again. The rest of America, though, will likely lose out, either through the loss of basic government services or the elimination of safety regulations affecting our communities and our workplaces.
Even Musk himself has admitted this effort will involve “hardship” for everyday Americans. Yup, hardship for us regular folks, but not for the one percenters like Musk and Trump, who have no idea about the lives of every-day Americans struggling to keep their heads above water.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Musk argued that “most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats — tens of thousands of them each year.” What he didn’t say is that in most cases, these regulations exist in response to specific identified problems and after extended public hearings.
And many have also overcome the the type of court challenge that Musk’s Space X is now waging against the National Labor Relations Board. After the Board filed complaints that Space X blocked workers’ rights and union organizing, that company and Amazon, facing similar complaints, jointly filed suit charging the Board’s structure is unconstitutional.
If the companies win, the Board — tasked with enforcing labor laws and settling labor-related complaints against employers — could be immensely diminished, that is if Musk doesn’t get it eliminated once Trump gets into office. Good to know the Trump team is supportive of the working man and woman, right?
Let’s take this a step further: Regulations protect us now by doing such things as mandating automobile recalls, making sure the food we eat and the drugs we take are safe, that our water and air are clean, and by protecting worker safety and the right of laborers to have a voice in their own welfare.
Instead of public hearings, Musk and Ramaswamy — the billionaires deciding what regular folks can do without — will be able to personally push spending cuts the public won’t have any chance to comment on and, perhaps, our elected representatives in Congress won’t be able to consider, according to the Musk opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Along with eliminating regulations, this destructive duo has said they plan to drastically trim the number of government employees, along with federally-supported health, science and environmental studies.
Are the growing number of older folks struggling to survive ready to get their Social Security checks every two months, instead of monthly (and occasionally not at all) because of manpower shortages? Are they ready to be put on hold for hours when we call Social Security with a question? Will Social Security offices be closed or, at the minimum, positioned physically further apart than they are already?
Will Medicare and Medicaid coverage be cut back? How far will Trump let Musk push him?
That’s one of the most important questions in American politics right now along with the threat to our justice system inherent in Trump’s retribution drive and his and Musk’s moves to undercut the ability of Congress to do its job. What do you think?