Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024.
On Wednesday of last week, the richest person in the world seized control of the government of the United States. It's going to be helpful, over the next four years, to note down the events that happen, when they happen, before the next events come along. The South African–born speculative technology entrepreneur Elon Musk ordered Congress not to pass the spending deal it was about to pass, and Congress obeyed him.
As Friday turned over into Saturday, at the last possible moment to avoid a government shutdown—or slightly after, though no one minded—Congress approved a different spending deal, with swaths of previously agreed-on legislation cut out of it. Pharmaceutical benefits managers were allowed to keep siphoning money out of Medicare and Ticketmaster was free to keep hiding its fees from customers, but daily federal operations were funded into mid-March. The budget crisis was over, or at least paused.
The real crisis was here to stay. To say that Congress did, in the end, pass a spending bill is like saying that Joe Biden did end up taking office peacefully in January of 2021. The mob that Donald Trump sent to the Capitol didn't overturn the 2020 election result, it merely established that the Republican Party—and with it, half of the two-party system—belonged to violent reactionaries, unconstrained by the constitution or criminal law. Musk's blitz of posting did not shut down the government, or achieve his demand via Twitter, that "No bills should be passed Congress until Jan. 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office." It simply demonstrated that one private person, acting on his own crank impulses, could command Congress to come to a halt, and Congress would, with the president-elect going along.
Like the last coup attempt, this power grab was bungling and incoherent. Once again, the only immediate effect was to smash up some things—food-stamp fraud protection, rather than windows—and to cause a lot of commotion, and to waste Congress's time. Musk made it clear that he didn't know anything about what he was doing: He raged against the congressional pay raise in the measure while inflating its value by an order of magnitude, demanded that nonexistent Washington, D.C. stadium funds be stripped out, and warned that the bill was "funding bioweapon labs" when it was funding bio-containment facilities. "Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!" he posted, apparently unaware that the Senate runs on staggered six-year terms.
There's a theory that Musk was specifically scheming to kill the parts of the original bill that would have tightened restrictions on investments in "sensitive technologies" in China. But if he was putting on a show to distract from his real financial interests, it was a show that looked exactly like the strenuously aggrieved, fractally distractible posting he indulges in all the time. By Thursday night, while Congress was scrambling up to come up with a new and different spending deal that might pass, Musk's attention had flickered across the Atlantic. At 1:03 a.m., he posted "Only the AfD can save Germany," endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland party in the upcoming election.
On one level, that could have been read as Musk embracing his personal fascist heritage. But also he was pretty blatantly trying to ingratiate himself with, or flirt with, a 24-year-old fascist influencer who had posted a pro-Musk, pro-AfD video with her face filter-tuned into waifishness. Musk has commandeered a culturally dominant social media platform and re-engineered it to make himself the most visible and important figure on it, yet he's still a floppy follower at heart, scrounging for approval.
What happens when a reply guy is in command? As when Trump himself listens to his rally crowds to figure out what to care about, Musk was riding waves of borrowed resentment, reposting those biowarfare conspiracies straight from Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok—who posts, in turn, whatever will best keep her own audience seething and therefore engaged. The propaganda machine propagandizes the propagandizers first; the agenda is what keeps the agenda going.
When the Associated Press posted on Friday, "A car has driven into a group of people at a Christmas market in Germany," vice president–elect JD Vance quote-posted "Who was driving the car?"—not because he was doing pedestrian-safety urbanist media criticism, but because an apparent attack on European Christians was the story his chosen audience would want to hear. As the incoming vice president, Vance presumably could have put his question directly to informed sources in the counterterrorism sector. Instead, he put it out rhetorically, for his readers to answer as they chose. When the real answer turned out to be that the accused attacker was a Saudi-born anti-Muslim obsessive who shared Vance's xenophobia and enthusiasm for AfD, Vance simply left the post up and moved on.
"When we act, we create our own reality," an anonymous George W. Bush administration official, now presumed to be Karl Rove, told the reporter Ron Suskind 22 years ago. It sounded at the time like maximum nihilism, but the official was at least referring to a shared experience: The people exercising power would change things, and their critics would just have to live with the effects of that power.
Now Trump, Vance, and Musk are blustering their way forward with the confidence that none of what they do has to mean anything, and that no one bears responsibility. As the spending-bill chaos spread, it was easy enough to declare that Musk had revealed himself to be the real president-in-waiting. It fit the facts, and Musk and Trump and their hangers-on were gratifyingly huffy and defensive about it, to the point of spinning up a whole new branch of conspiracy theory about why people would say such a thing.
But it also felt like an over-rationalization of events. So too did the effort by the most fanatically Trumpy House members to start talking about replacing Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House with Musk. Ridiculous as that was, it represented some sort of vague recognition of how far out of hand the whole episode had gotten: Making Musk the Speaker would at least wedge his role back within the limits of the constitutional order.
The question around Trump's second presidency all along has been who will actually be in charge. Trump didn't have the basic ability or work ethic to do the job before, and now he's four years more decrepit, confused, and uninterested. The point of Project 2025 was that as soon as Trump moved back into the Oval Office, a corps of well-trained, reptilian little go-getters would roll up their sleeves and start implementing the wishlist for the people who'd been funding the conservative movement. They would take care of reversing the 20th-century regulatory state and civil rights movement, while Trump went golfing or played with his model of Air Force One.
But before they could even get started, Musk's drug-churned mania expanded to fill the Trump-sized void. The plutocracy skipped straight ahead to oligarchy. Musk's antics with Congress were just an outward expression of how his position had already changed. As of next month, the officials who wouldn't let him know what was on his own rockets, or who tried to investigate him for seemingly blatant securities manipulation or the way his fake driving software kills people will all be working for Trump. Since the stretch run of the campaign, Musk has gained something like $200 billion in net worth. That's the dollar value, so far, of being immune to consequences.
