Meanwhile, it’s possible you may have missed the boat entirely…..
THE WORD FOR THIS IS OLIGARCHY, AND OLIGARCHS DON’T THINK OF THE COUNTRY FIRST:
There’s a mundane reason for the late-term chaos, and it’s called a conflict of interest.
prospect.org
“Almost four years to the day, we’re back here again. But this time, Trump is a side player in the show. He and his transition team
reportedly had no problem with the 2024 version of a year-end spending bill until this week. Then Elon Musk starting
posting into a frenzy about how a perfectly normal bipartisan agreement represented a total betrayal,
lying about the contents in the process. Trump had to be roused to back up his co-president, getting House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to construct a partisan solution while inserting an eleventh-hour, two-year suspension of the debt limit to prevent the Republican trifecta from having to deal with that nuisance in the next Congress…..
That brings us back to the initial reason for the blowup: Elon’s endless scroll. Which appears to be tied to none of the inaccurate reasons he offered on X, but an old standby for billionaires: personal financial and business incentives. The original bill would have made it harder for Musk to build Tesla factories in Shanghai.
Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.
The bill would add some reporting requirements and enhanced reviews as well; in general, it expands restrictions that the Treasury Department has
already put forward in regulatory rules. Codifying those rules into statute means that they cannot be changed by successive administrations.
You can argue about whether the U.S. should be restricting investment in China. But it’s incontrovertible that a billionaire who has a bunch of investments in China and wants to make more all of a sudden disrupted a normal congressional process that was going to restrict that investment with a
bunch of lies from his media platform. And lo and behold, when the new funding bill emerged, the outbound investment feature was
dropped. In fact, all traces of provisions related to China were removed from the bill.
(Red: See what America’s, and the planet’s, richest oligarch did? He took care of himself.):
So Donald Trump, alleged leader of the realignment of populist Republicans, scuttled a spending bill primarily to shield the richest man in the world’s investments in China and the profits of UnitedHealth Group, owners of the second-largest pharmacy benefit manager.
This is going to be a constant theme of the next four years. Personal business interests are going to constantly take precedence over governance in the Trump/Musk White House.
THE WORD FOR THIS IS OLIGARCHY, AND OLIGARCHS DON’T THINK OF THE COUNTRY FIRST. .
Millions of federal employees, including service members, won’t see paychecks over Christmas, national parks will be shut down, food inspections and countless other government functions will stop because a Elon Musk doesn’t want anyone poking around his business in China.“
Musk got the only thing that he wanted. Does Trump realize it?
prospect.org
Elon Musk blew up a near-complete bipartisan budget deal with an avalanche of tweets contending that it was too costly, luring Donald Trump into demanding that Republicans kill it. But Musk’s real reason—
a story that David Dayen broke in the Prospect—was that the agreement included painstakingly negotiated limits on American tech investment in China. Had that provision passed, it would have been costly to Musk’s extensive Chinese Tesla operations and future AI plans.
In contrast to Trump, Musk played his hand in a way that made sure that he won his objective, and didn’t mind sacrificing Trump’s. In blessing the revised deal, which passed the House late Friday, 366-34, and the Senate, 85-11, Musk disingenuously praised Congress for drastically shrinking the total spending. This was total ********, since the budget numbers of the original deal and final one were almost identical. But shrinking spending wasn’t the goal: keeping the government out of his China business was.
In short, Musk outplayed Trump. Musk is not the sort of guy you can take to the woodshed. And the Inaugural is still a month away.
Today on TAP: Can the Trump-Musk bromance possibly end well?
prospect.org
