The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump has been ranting wildly and angrily over the last 24 hours about his “big, beautiful bill.” It’s past the House, but Trump seems to fear it might not get through the Senate. He lashed out furiously at Senator Rand Paul over this, revealing his own uncertainty about where this is all going. But then Elon Musk threw a grenade into the proceedings, unleashing a pair of tweets that ripped the bill as an “abomination” that will explode the deficit by trillions of dollars. The funny thing about this is that Musk was being dishonest in his own way, but he still wrecked the scam that Trump and Mike Johnson have carefully concocted to sell this bill, which will create a lot of problems for them in the GOP. Today, we’re talking about all this with Alex Shephard, senior editor at The New Republic and author of a new piece arguing that the damage Musk has done is only beginning. Good to have you on, Alex.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Elon Musk did. He tweeted on Tuesday that “this massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion.” Musk is not wrong about some of that. The GOP bill, which Trump has endorsed, would blow up the deficit. But Musk left out the part where it’s the huge tax cuts for the rich that are a big reason for that. What’s your reaction to Musk’s eruption, Alex?
Shephard: I think the shortest and most straightforward answer with Musk is that he’s having a tantrum and that he’s been kicked to the curb here. He had thought that he was going to be treated as this great savior who is reshaping not just the Republican Party but the way that the federal government worked. I think that while, like I argued in my piece, there are various ways in which that is true, the big overarching idea that this was going to be some small-government revolution just hasn’t happened. So I think that the short answer here is that Musk has failed. He knows he has failed.
We also know that he is a pretty serious drug user who is prone to serious bouts of misjudgment and erratic behavior. And when I first saw these tweets earlier, I said, Well, this is all of this stuff just compounded.
Sargent: So he went in there with DOGE, and he was going to use his tech wizardry and use his band of young, brilliant guys to find all these cuts magically that would downsize the government and no one would notice; it would be just made more efficient, right? And of course that didn’t happen because there isn’t a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. That’s the thing that they can never accept to be true. Musk discovered that, failed, and now he’s got to say that Republicans without him are just blowing up the deficit because they’re not doing what he said. That’s the size of it, right?
Shephard: Yeah. I think it’s exactly right that the tantrum is about his point of view or recent ideological conversion not taking hold. It’s a recognition. Earlier when Musk had talked about this—it’s always tempting to psychoanalyze but you could see a way of him criticizing the bill as a justification of all this, right? Like I would have succeeded if not for this pesky bill. But I think what we’ve now entered into is a new stage and one that I think is fairly familiar to any longtime observer of Elon from maybe the “pedo guy” tweets in, whenever that was, 2013–14 to the present—that this is somebody who, not unlike Donald Trump, when he doesn’t get his way, he just digs in and digs in and eventually erupts.
Sargent: It’s funny, I had forgotten about the “pedo guy” tweets, but we should have really recognized that there might be a problem with this guy. OK, so House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked to react to Musk’s criticisms on the bill. Johnson said he was really disappointed in Musk and he said the following.
Mike Johnson (audio voiceover): With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the One Big, Beautiful Bill. We had a long conversation yesterday. He and I spoke for, I think, more than 20 minutes on the telephone, and I extolled all the virtues of the bill, and he seemed to understand that. The top line on this is two very important things. We’re making permanent a massive tax cut, and we are making a massive reduction in spending. $1.6 trillion is the calculation. I’ve said this many times, I’ll be saying that until we get this thing over the line: This is the most amount of money that any government has ever saved on planet Earth, in a piece of legislation. Ever.
Sargent: So it’s just a towering lie that this bill saves so much money. It would in fact add trillions to the deficit, again, partly because of the tax cuts for the rich. But that last part is the thing they cannot say. This is what both Musk and Mike Johnson have to deny. They just have to work their way around the fact that the center of this, which is that they want to cut taxes for the rich and they need to slash the safety net to do so. Alex, it looks to me like Mike Johnson knows Musk’s condemnation of the bill is a problem for Republicans. What do you think on that front?
Shephard: Yeah. I think one other way of reading Musk’s most recent outburst is that it was designed to get this exact response, right? He had tried a more normal or more evenhanded criticism in interviews after leaving the government. And now he got it. But I think what he’s unintentionally done is just revealed, as you said, the total incoherence of this entire project—that Trump is claiming to be this new-era, even in some cases redistributive, Republican president; he’s not like other Republicans. And the bill itself is in many ways bog-standard GOP stuff that increases the deficit while promising to do something else.
I think one of the things that’s funny about this is that Musk and Johnson are both caught in the same rhetorical vortex. And as you previously said, they’re not actually talking about the substance of the bill, they’re both actually talking about two different fantasies of Republican government. On the one hand, this idea that you can just cut everything and that will make the country work and it will save it—that’s the Musk point of view. And Johnson is trying to explain the Trumpian version, which is that they’re doing all that Republican stuff. They’re redistributing wealth from the poorest people to the richest people, but actually all the benefits are being preserved and everything is great, and [they’re] bringing back factories. It’s both 1890 and 1955 again at the same time.
Sargent: Preferably 1890, from Trump’s point of view. So Trump himself actually revealed the core scam at work here, which I think you identified so well just there. Trump unleashed this wild rant on Truth Social in which he said Democrats are “desperate”; they “totally lost their confidence”; Trump won the greatest election victory in world history, all that nonsense. But I want to read a couple lines from it about the bill that are really key. Trump said this, “What nobody understands is that it’s the single biggest Spending Cut in History, by far! But there will be NO CUTS to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.” Then he ranted some more and said, “The only ‘cutting’ we will do is for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.” So Alex, it’s the single biggest spending cut in history, and there will be zero cuts to some of the biggest drivers of spending of all—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They’ll only cut waste, and abuse. That’s just amazing. The contempt he’s got for his followers and supporters is just extraordinary. Any thoughts on that tweet?
Shephard: It’s a bill also that increases defense spending, right? Which is the principal reason why Musk’s goal at DOGE failed—they never really got to touch the Pentagon budget at all and instead just pursued various liberal bugbears like USAID and other places. Again, it’s that they’re trapped in this big lie. I think Trump himself may not understand any of this or may not care at all, but there’s this fantasy that they’re pushing, which is, in some ways, the central fantasy of Trumpism itself: that they can pursue Republican ends by other means, that they can somehow cut taxes for the rich and not cut entitlement spending. What, I think, was the key to Trump’s success in the “blue wall” states in 2016 was the promise to not cut Social Security. But what we’re seeing now is that in power, Republicans are pursuing many of the same ends that they have since time immemorial—and they’re trying to sell it this way.
I think that it’s obvious, Musk is right. This is a bill that increases the deficit. But to make the claim otherwise, Trump and Johnson are now having to claim that it doesn’t do precisely what it does, which is kick millions of people off their health care.
Sargent: Yeah. Speaking of that, we should clarify that Trump is just lying in saying they’ll only cut waste, fraud, and abuse. The bill would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and potentially knock 10 million off coverage. But I think what this shows also is that Trump has to simultaneously say it’s an enormous spending cut to hide the fact that it balloons the deficit in order to make the rich richer while also saying he isn’t touching Medicaid because that screws his own voters, right? So the only way out for them is to define those cuts to the safety net as merely cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. I think that’s going to be the route out for Republicans here, especially the Senate ones who seem to have a twinge of conscience about the Medicaid cuts. They’ll just tell themselves and the world that all they’re cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse, and they’ll accept the cuts to Medicaid. And that’s how we’ll get out of this. But I think Trump laid the whole scam bare in one tweet there.
Shephard: Yeah. Along those lines too, this is the fundamental lie of the whole operation, which is that Trump has broken with this 50-year conservative consensus around cutting the welfare state—or you could say 100-year, post–New Deal Republican Party opposition to any entitlement spending; that he will somehow preserve the things that people like while getting rid of all of that awful waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s one reason why I think he’s such a powerful figure among low-information voters: He projects this vision of the federal government that everybody wants back again, that it’s rife with corruption and fraud, and that if you just got rid of all of that you could keep all the good stuff and reduce the budget deficit. And that’s a huge lie. I think ascribing good-faith motives to Elon Musk is not necessarily always a great way to proceed. I don’t entirely understand what he’s doing here—he probably is just lashing out. But at the same time, he has inadvertently really pulled back the curtain on the sham of this entire operation.
Sargent: Yes, but without admitting a key component of the scam, which is that it’s really shaped around tax cuts for the rich, right? What Elon Musk is doing is pushing his own scam, in which the only driver of deficits is runaway government spending and not tax cuts for the wealthy. Musk actually does harbor a pretty seriously plutocratic vision of what he wants the state to be, which is bankroll genius projects like his and just cut loose the global poor by ending USAID. And I think he would probably like to end Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, although I don’t know that for sure. He’s pushing his own ruse, his own bamboozlement—and yet at the same time, because he’s admitting that the bill balloons the deficit, which he’s doing for his own reasons to make the case that spending is bad, he actually unmasks the scam that Trump and Mike Johnson are pushing.
Shephard: No, it’s incredible, because they are two slightly different scams, right? If anyone had told me back in 2009 that 15 years later, the most prominent pusher of Tea Party ideology would be Elon Musk—the Silicon Valley titan, the E.V. battery-making hero of upper-crust liberals—I would be pretty shocked.
Sargent: And you have a grand theory of all this stuff that I think you wanted to tell us about. Why don’t you go into that?
Shephard: Yeah, it’s a little harebrained, but I do think that if you look back at the Tea Party—as the work of Theda Skocpol, the great Harvard sociologist, has shown—it was pretty clearly a populist response to the first Black president, but it was quickly astroturfed and taken over by conservative interest groups that are bankrolled by far-right billionaires, the Heritage Foundation, to push the stuff that Musk is. And that was successful for a while, but Trump’s rise was about the fact that the populist part was always being manipulated by elected Republicans. He put the immigration [and] racism all out front. And when I look at this bill, I see Trump’s success, in some ways, as a coalition builder, of reshaping this in his own image, of pushing parts of the old thing while putting it all in this MAGA package. But it’s always been premised on the idea that the MAGA portion is the dominant one and all the Heritage Foundation, the old stuff, is part of this.
The biggest part of this bill is the tax cut for the rich, but you’ve got to kiss the ring to Trump. I think Musk isn’t doing that, and what we’re seeing is this coalition that maybe not to his credit but Trump did successfully pull together to get elected start to crack again. And I think that could be really significant here, because Musk is threatening to not fund Republicans in the 2026 midterms. If he were to follow through on that, that would be significant politically. In any case, it shows that this current Trump administration, the coalition that he likes to boast about, was actually really held together by wire and string. We’re five months in, and it’s already fraying in a bunch of different ways.
Sargent: Right. Trump basically got elected because there was a global cost of living crisis, Biden was a terrible politician, Kamala Harris couldn’t introduce herself to the country in time, and Democrats had had three relatively successful cycles in a row. And we’re supposed to think, according to MAGA mythology, that it was Trump’s great working-class populism that led to this overwhelming victory. But it really does turn out that the Trump-MAGA coalition is incredibly fragile. And that is, in a way, why they couldn’t actually cut Medicaid more than they are doing now. They wanted to cut it much more deeply. Trump too. And they couldn’t because it would cost them some significant component of their working-class support because a lot of Trump voters in MAGA country are on Medicaid. So it looks to me like you’re right in saying that the fragility of the Trump coalition is really the story here.
Shephard: Yeah. And there’s another piece of this, as well. I think one way that I’ve been understanding this version of the Trump administration is as this, I call it, shopping spree of chaos or destruction or kamikaze mission. Essentially, Trump and the people closest to him realized that they didn’t actually get that much done the first time around. And what we’re seeing particularly in the first five or six months is an effort to reshape as much of the country as humanly possible before enough endangered Republicans lose the political will to follow along.
Sargent: And lose their seats. The big driver of this is that House Republicans in difficult districts don’t want to go along with really deep Medicaid cuts. They went along with pretty deep ones, and so they’re probably in trouble. They really only have a two-year window to realize the MAGA takeover of the world.
Shephard: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Sargent: So where does this end up? How do you see it playing out? It looks to me like Musk did create a major problem for Republicans, but all he did was just reveal the scam that Republicans, as you said, have been using for 50 years, right? I think the end game will be that those Senate Republicans who are balking now.... [I’m] not sure about Rand Paul because he seems to have trouble with the deficit component, but the Senate Republicans who have trouble with the Medicaid cuts just find a way to support a fairly large segment of those cuts in “cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.” And that’s how they get out of this. What do you think is going to happen?
Shephard: Yeah, I think that the cynical portion of me says that in some ways Musk has [done] those types of Republicans a favor. He’s given them a way out. They can just say, Look, I respect Elon and he did a lot of great work at DOGE, but he’s wrong about this, and the president is right. And the president is more popular with Republican voters, and he’s more popular with general voters. Most likely what’s going to happen is they’re going to keep pushing this through. You’re never going to hear about the tax cut element. You’re just going to hear about this big, gigantic bill that protects Medicaid and lowers the deficit. And then you start to say, Oh, [I] keep hearing all about this bill. What does it actually do? Where’s the money going? And they never tell you.
Sargent: They certainly don’t. I do think they get through this somehow, and we all get screwed, but hopefully they take a major political hit from it. Alex Shephard, always awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Shephard: It was great. This is fun.