This is an adapted excerpt from the June 4 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
There’s a civil war brewing in the Republican Party and it’s threatening the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s legislative agenda: his one big, beautiful, disgusting abomination of a bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says will add almost $2.5 trillion to the deficit, while depriving more than 11 million Americans of health care coverage in the next decade.
To say this is leaving the Republican caucus in disarray is an understatement.
That bill is now meeting new resistance from far-right members of Congress, thanks to the actions of Trump’s one-time wingman, Elon Musk. Shortly after his DOGE days in the White House ended in embarrassing fashion, with a literal black eye and reports left and right about alleged drug use and other weird behavior, Musk started this week off by declaring war on Trump’s legislation. (Musk has denied the reported drug use.)
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk posted on his social media platform, X, on Tuesday. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
To say this leaves the Republican caucus in disarray would be an understatement. Just days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is shepherding the spending bill through Congress, posted a photo of himself riding in style with Musk and Trump. But on Wednesday, he said he couldn’t even get Musk on the phone.
“We’ve gotta get it done, and I think Elon understands the weight of that,” Johnson told reporters. “I hope he comes around, and I’d love to talk to him this week, and I hope he calls me back today.” (As of Thursday morning, Johnsons told reporters they were still playing phone tag.)
Hours after that Wednesday news conference, Musk posted a call to action against the Trump legislation on X: “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.” (In case that was too subtle, eight minutes later, he also posted a movie poster for the film “Kill Bill.”)
But this is more than just a food fight. Remember, Musk threatened to primary Republicans who won’t toe the MAGA line. Now, the threat seems to be that he could primary Republicans who pass Trump’s bill. And so some of those Republicans are tying themselves in knots to try to keep both Trump and Musk happy.
When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was asked about Musk’s criticism, she told reporters, “Well, you know I have to agree with him on one hand. I always love it when Americans are angry at the federal government and express it … And so, do I like the price tag of the bill? No. But I want to get off the Biden and Democrat CR that this government is currently funding on.”
At one level, this is a story of two people with enormous egos who were never going to be content as co-presidents. But the deeper story here calls into question the entire Trump enterprise and what Trump was using Musk for, which was to make really unpopular cuts across the government.
Cuts that followed the Project 2025 playbook and appealed to the most hardcore anti-government extremists in the Republican base and far-right members of Congress, like the House Freedom Caucus, who want a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.
But as a policy, that approach is substantively disastrous and politically unpopular. It is not even popular with Trump, who has no qualms about running up massive budget deficits. He told everyone he’s not going to touch Social Security or Medicare. But he has to worry about pro-austerity Republicans, so he outsourced the austerity to Musk and DOGE. That way, Trump could say to the anti-government vanguard in Congress, “Oh, don’t worry about the deficit and the debt or spending, because I’ve got Musk going to town over there. He’s just going to cut all the stuff you don’t like, and no one in Congress is going to have to take hard votes.” But this was always a dubious play. First, because what DOGE was doing was illegal, as many courts have found. Second, Musk wasn’t actually making a dent in federal spending. He decimated our international aid budget, but that was never where the big government spending was, contrary to all the lies and false conspiracy theories Musk spread. Most importantly, Musk’s activities were so unpopular that the American people’s outrage blew back on Trump and the Republicans. In town hall after town hall, it became clear that Trump’s play for plausible deniability was a failure. That’s why I believe the White House didn’t keep Musk on and why he’s freelancing now. Trump’s special weapon against party division has always been his cult of personality. When it comes to voting for their own beliefs or voting for Trump, Republican lawmakers almost always vote for Trump. That was enough to get the bill through the House. This is the Frankenstein’s monster that Trump helped create: A guy who has virtually unlimited funds to primary politicians he doesn’t like. But there are Republicans, particularly in the Senate, folks such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who are being very vocal about wanting to scale back Trump’s legislation drastically, to pull it apart or to kill it. And now, thanks to political cover from Musk, senators such as Tuberville, Paul and Johnson may be even more emboldened to resist Trump. This is the Frankenstein’s monster that Trump helped create: A guy who has virtually unlimited funds to primary politicians he doesn’t like. Musk is giving these Republicans cover to rail in the way that they are politically comfortable with — and he has a massive social media platform that he can use to supercharge the debate, just as he used it to spread totally ridiculous stories and false numbers about what DOGE has been up to. That points to a real danger here: Musk’s propaganda machine now rivals Fox News in its ability to influence and target the right wing of the Republican Party. It seems Trump is discovering that his oligarchy would be great … if it weren’t for the oligarchs.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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