Elon Musk Is Using His Platform and Power to Meme Us Into a Government Shutdown

AutopilotR
Estimated read time 6 min read


Elon Musk spent the past few days posting about a government spending bill on X, the website he owns. Musk, who is cozy with the incoming Trump administration and thinks the government spends too much money, did not want the spending bill to pass. He posted about this more than 100 times. As of this writing, it appears that Musk has gotten his wish.

Angry constituents called their representatives. The GOP’s most unhinged members revolted and the bill is dead in the water. It’s possible that we will begin the holiday season with a government shutdown. One orchestrated by an unelected billionaire.

This is our future.

Elon Musk began to hector and post about the bill on Wednesday. “No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” he said in a post on X.

Rep. Marjorie Taylore Greene of Georgia, of course, supported a government shutdown. “The government can shut down all the way until Jan 20th as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “AND WE MUST STAND FIRM WITH THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO STOP THE MADNESS!!”

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina got in on the act and posted pictures of herself hovering over the massive 1,500 page continuing resolution “The last CR we did was 21 pages. This once is 1,547. Let that sink in. More pages, more taxpayer dollars flushed down the drain.”

“Here they are side by side,” she said in a follow-up tweet that included no photo.

By the afternoon, pictures of the CR with the words “Kill Bill” stylized to match the Quentin Tarantino film were trending on X. In a reply to a Musk post, Nancy showed off an AI-generated picture of herself dressed as the Bride, the hero from the film.

A thirsty reply guy responded to the fake photo of the yellow cat-suited Mace. “I want you to cut my arms off.”

“You’re out of control,” Mace replied to her reply guy, followed by a laughing cry face emoji.

I’m glad everyone is having fun.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the long-winded Gallant to Musk’s shitposting Goofus at the Department of Government Efficiency, wrote a 400-word post about the 1,500-page spending bill. He’d read it, he said, so you don’t have to. “Keeping the government open until March 14 will cost ~$380BN by itself, but the true cost of this omnibus CR is far greater due to new spending,” he said.

Hours late to his own party, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about the bill at 6:40 PM on Wednesday. “If Republicans try to pass a clean Continuing Resolution without all of the Democrat ‘bells and whistles’ that will be so destructive to our Country, all it will do, after January 20th, is bring the mess of the Debt Limit into the Trump Administration, rather than allowing it to take place in the Biden Administration,” he said. “Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this should, and will, be Primaried. Everything should be done, and fully negotiated, prior to my taking Office on January 20th, 2025.”

The saga of the CR bill is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is Trump’s notable absence from the proceedings. Musk has made himself the face of this thing. The unelected South African immigrant billionaire has come to D.C. to flex his muscles and curtail government spending. He seems to have won the first round. He did it, in part, by posting.

It’s true that government spending bills are full of pork. There’s always carve-outs, pork barrel projects, and raises for the people in power in Washington. This Continuing Resolution was no different. It would have kept the lights on, but it also would have enriched the people who wrote the bill.

I suspect that Musk and his cohort, despite their claims otherwise, simply want to change who is enriched by the bills. Musk is good with money. He knows how to extract it from the world around him. He’s not a tech genius, he’s an extraction genius. His wealth is built, in part, on billions of dollars of government contracts. It’s a good bet that, after four years of Trump, he’ll have more billions and more contracts. Not less. And he’ll post through it all, making his followers think he’s fighting for them as he lines his own pockets.

On Thursday, Trump prattled on about abolishing the debt ceiling—a limit set by Congress on the amount of cash it can borrow to pay Washington’s bills. In an interview with NBC, Trump again called for the end of the ceiling. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said. So. While Musk was advocating for a government shutdown because of cost overruns, Trump stumped for the elimination of a limit on the amount of cash the government can borrow. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren quickly jumped in to agree with Trump on abolishing the debt ceiling.

On Thursday morning, Rep. Greene called for Elon Musk to become speaker of the house. “DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning in Congress to enact real government efficiency.  The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”





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