By Philip Bump · The Washington Post (c) 2024
It’s been apparent for some time that Elon Musk and Donald Trump align on more than politics. Each has a, let’s say, robust sense of his own importance and an apparent need for others to recognize that importance. Both have a large fan base happy to offer that recognition. And both have a view of the world that is often untainted by what the world actually is.
Particularly because of the first point, it was not necessarily predestined that the two should ally. It’s fair to assume that the alliance that currently exists is fragile, with any slight misalignment of how each wants to deploy his power (or wants to seek credit for it) leading to its rupture. But for now, it exists and Wednesday scored its first political victory: submarining a compromise spending resolution on Capitol Hill.
It’s not clear who led the push. Musk came out in opposition early Wednesday; Trump didn’t join in publicly until hours later, after the resolution was already seemingly doomed. Over the course of the day, Republican legislators, fielding both online and real-world complaints, turned on the agreement reached by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), raising the specter of a government shutdown from lack of funding.
For many fans of Musk or Trump – an overlapping group – that’s just fine. Their disdain for government is real, at times because their understanding of it is incomplete or erroneous (as Musk demonstrated his was). A shutdown of government exists as an abstraction, a part of the political culture war.
Musk and his allies quickly hailed the collapse of the agreement as a manifestation of the will of the American public.
“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead,” he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. “The voice of the people has triumphed!” He added, “VOX POPULI / VOX DEI,” Latin for “The voice of the people [is] the voice of God,” a melodramatic phrase he has previously deployed after, for example, conducting a poll on X about whether to reinstate the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s partner in leading the external group tasked by Trump with reshaping government spending, agreed with this sentiment, also on X.
“We the People won,” he wrote. “That’s how America is supposed to work.”
It isn’t, actually. As Republicans long liked to remind people, America is a republic in which citizens elect representatives to make decisions about how the country should be run. Those representatives are tasked with understanding the complexities of government and reaching consensus on how to proceed. We don’t subject everything to a national plebiscite.
More importantly, though, X (and social media in general) is not in any robust sense “the people.” Anyone can sign up for and use the platform, with fewer doing so than in the past, thanks to Musk’s reshaping its functionality and his institution of a de facto political worldview. The people agreeing with Musk in polls or replies are not necessarily American citizens, much less constituents of the politicians they’re haranguing – much less humans rather than snippets of code.
Even soon after Musk took over, his poll results didn’t match actual public opinion, and there’s no reason to think they are more representative now. What we saw Wednesday was just a lot of fans of Musk and Trump who were able to create a critical volume of complaint – something that’s relatively easy to do. Legislators might feel overwhelmed by a flood of fury that consists of a few dozen phone calls or a few hundred aggressive social media replies. It’s a fairly trivial benchmark to reach.
We should remember, too, that a lot of the Republican opposition to the resolution would have existed without Musk’s astroturfing. In September 2023, a funding resolution was tanked by the opposition of about 20 Republican legislators, many of them fervent Trump allies. Knee-jerk opposition to spending money on the government was popular on the right before Musk decided to make politics his second career. Republican acquiescence to his push Wednesday was often less about being convinced by his argument (such as it was) than about being interested in basking in his spotlight.
This is a critically important point. Musk has no more claim to representing the public and wielding its power than he is afforded. His massive investment in the 2024 campaign did not demonstrably affect the outcome, but he’s been happy to accept credit for it. That credit, in turn, means that when he shakes his cudgel at Republican elected officials – warning of primaries or hinting that they could run afoul of “the public”/X users – they might conceivably waver. The essence of a paper tiger is that it looks scary. A digital one is no different.
Musk’s play is similar to Trump’s insistence that he won a staggering mandate in last month’s election. The more people believe that his win was a sweeping endorsement rather than the narrow victory that it actually was, the less likely they are to want to enter into conflict with him. Trump, at least, can point to actual votes. All Musk can point to is the ruckus on the social media site he bought. He has no mandate for political leadership; in Quinnipiac University polling released on Wednesday, a majority of Americans indicated opposition to Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration.
It used to be that people who treated Twitter opinions as substantial were derided for conflating Twitter with real life. But now, having spent $44 billion to reshape and rename the platform, Musk and his allies insist that X is a better representation of real life than real life itself. He insists that it and its foreign nationals and its robots and its scammers and its actual Americans can establish what the government does and doesn’t do. Trump, for now, is happy to let him offer that argument.
It only works, though, if politicians and other Americans agree to pretend that X actually is America’s “public square,” something it wasn’t before Musk bought it and something that is even less the case now. The real power of the people is the power people surrender to those who claim it.
The claim Musk is making is a particularly flimsy one.