Elon Musk is becoming Donald Trump's biggest headache
The centi-billionaire may have set the stage for a month of government chaos before Trump's second term begins
“Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail,” wrote Victor Hugo.
“A gun that breaks its moorings becomes suddenly some indescribable supernatural beast,” the writer observed in “Ninety-Three,” his final novel, which is based on the events of 1793 in the French Revolution.
A cannon on the deck of the warship Claymore breaks loose. It “turns upon its wheels, has the rapid movements of a billiard-ball; rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching; goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate; resumes its course, rushes along the ship from end to end like an arrow, circles about, springs aside, evades, rears, breaks, kills, exterminates.”
“The mad mass has the bounds of a panther, the weight of the elephant, the agility of the mouse, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs ten thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child’s ball…You can make a mastiff hear reason, astound a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, soften a lion; but there is no resource with that monster, a cannon let loose.”
The cannon crushes four sailors, cuts a fifth in two and does grievous damage to the ship before it is eventually brought under control and lashed.
Getting what you wanted
In a letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this month, self-described “moderate Republican Michael Heyer congratulated those who voted for Donald Trump. “You are now getting what you wanted: a disgruntled, vindictive, loose cannon for president again.”
But if the phrase “loose cannon” applies to the President-elect, it must surely also describe his chief backer, Elon Musk.

The centi-billionaire chief of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) this week gave a textbook demonstration of how to wreck a carefully constructed deal to keep the government funded from Saturday through mid-March.
To gain enough votes, including those of Democrats, House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to a 1,547-page bill that included disaster assistance, a $6,600 pay raise for members of Congress (their first in 15 years), additional money for child care and giving the District of Columbia control of RFK Stadium, which could allow for the return of the Washington Commanders from Maryland.
After details of the bill emerged, Musk fired a fusillade of more than 100 tweets, including “a number of misleading or outright false claims,” Politico reported.
Among those were Musk’s reposting of tweets that Congress was giving itself a 40% pay raise (it was 3.8 %) and that the bill authorized a $3-billion football stadium for Washington, D.C. (it didn’t).
Musk got out well in front of Trump in his opposition to the bill. Musk’s tweets prompted an outcry among constituents who let GOP members of Congress know how they felt. And Mike Johnson had to eventually cancel plans for a vote on the bill, leaving the prospects of averting a government shutdown unclear.
Debt limit?
Trump seemed blindsided. Strangely, his first extended comment came in a tweet posted at 4:28 p.m. Wednesday, not on his X or Truth Social accounts, but on the X account of his Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
Labeled “a statement from President Donald J. Trump and Vice President-Elect JD Vance,” it brought up a new objection to the spending bill: that it didn’t include an extension of the US government’s debt ceiling, which could be reached next summer.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Trump and Vance said. “If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
In response, Democrats said that if Johnson seeks to pass a revised spending bill that includes a debt-limit increase, he will have to rely exclusively on Republican votes. And many Republicans have staunchly opposed such increases. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Seventy-one House Republicans voted against the last debt-ceiling increase in May 2023.”
The “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people that results from a government shutdown or worse,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
On Thursday afternoon, Republicans scrambled to develop a scaled-down bill that would fund the government till mid-March and extend the debt limit for two years.
The cannon is rolling around on deck, and it’s not clear if anyone can stop it.
They really deserve each other. The question that will decide the future of this bizarre relationship is this: Which one of Trump’s pathologies will prevail? His narcissism will demand that he cut Musk loose, so that Trump remains the only center of attention. But his greed will demand that he keep Musk and all his billions close. Stay tuned.
I have no words for what that group conjures in my being! There are none in my vocabulary.