Elon Musk’s Attempts to Meddle in Foreign Affairs Blows up in His Face

Elon Musk is putting his nose in foreign politics yet again, but this time he’s setting a target on MP Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party.

“The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk wrote in a post on X Sunday.

Farage, a key figure in Brexit, shared the post, commenting, “Well, this is a surprise!”

“Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree,” Farage continued. “My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”

Raheem Kassam, an editor who previously worked at Steve Bannon’s Breitbart and served as a former aide to Farage, replied to Musk slightly more bluntly. “You’re a fucking moron,” he wrote in a post on X.

Last week, Musk voiced his support for Robinson, a far-right, Islamaphobic activist who founded the British National Party and has been imprisoned for contempt of court, related to his repeated racially charged libel of a 15-year-old Syrian boy through social media posts.

Beneath Farage’s post, Grok, Musk’s heinously annoying generative artificial intelligence that’s been tacked into X’s user interface, offered a few leading questions for users to ask so that it might generate answers. “What leadership qualities does Farage lack?” Grok suggested. “Why does Elon Musk support Tommy Robinson?”

“How does this affect Reform UK’s image?” asked another prompt, implying that Musk’s opinion of the foreign government would have any bearing at all on the major party.

Early Monday morning, Musk posted on X again, this time creating a poll: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government,” with two options, yes or no.

Mike Johnson is trying to convince everyone that he rewon the speakership on his good word alone. Johnson was awarded speaker of the House on Friday after the second vote, flipping Republican votes from Keith Self and Ralph Norman that he initially didn’t have. They flipped their votes very quickly, leading to suspicions that Johnson may have capitulated in some way to these congressmen’s demands regarding policy priorities.

But Johnson denies this. “My simple message to my colleagues is, make suggestions about process improvements, we’re open to that at all times. But I don’t make deals with anyone. There’s no quid pro quo here. I don’t do anything in exchange for a vote,” said Johnson, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

The platform Johnson announced after winning the speakership harps on fiscal responsibility and tackling the “swamp’s” corruption, something that Republican holdouts like Representative Victoria Spartz had demanded.

“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important,” Spartz posted on Thursday. “However, we still need to get assurances that Speaker Johnson won’t sell us out to the swamp.”

Johnson spoke of a “promise of fiscal responsibility” and holding people “accountable” in an X post after winning the speakership.

Nancy Mace got Trump on the phone to persuade holdout Republicans to support Mike Johnson’s speakership, according to The Washington Post. After Republicans Ralph Norman and Keith Self initially opposed Johnson, Representative Nancy Mace called Donald Trump directly and then passed the phone to her two colleagues. Norman and Self then spoke to Johnson before flipping their votes to him to give him the 218 votes needed for speaker.

Self told reporters he had a “lively” phone call with the president-elect. “We shored up the reconciliation team because we know that this will be a heavy lift to get the Trump agenda across the line in the reconciliation package.… That’s all we did,” said Self, according to CNN’s Manu Raju. Trump publicly congratulated Johnson on Truth Social following the vote.

What exactly convinced these congressmen to change their votes in 30 minutes remains to be seen. But even with this flip, the Republican infighting seems to be just getting started.

Rudy Giuliani could be fined or jailed Friday for his continued refusal to transfer $11 million in assets to a pair of Georgia poll workers that he repeatedly defamed while pushing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference conspiracy. But that’s not what flooded Giuliani’s mind as he appeared in federal court in lower Manhattan.

Instead, Giuliani was more concerned with his depiction by veteran court sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, whom he tasked with making him look good this time around.

“The last time you made me look like my dog,” he told the artist, per the New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman.

Giuliani is on trial to determine whether he must hand over his multimillion-dollar Florida condominium to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother-daughter duo of election workers whom he’s spent the last year worming his way out of paying nearly $150 million in damages.

Earlier this year, Giuliani claimed that the condo was his permanent residence, granting it homestead protection from debt-collection proceedings under state law. But his legal opposition has argued that Giuliani was less than forthcoming during the discovery process, suggesting that the disgraced politico wasn’t being honest about how he utilizes the property.

In November, the former gang-busting federal prosecutor tried on a new legal defense to keep his stuff, arguing in a Manhattan courthouse that he couldn’t possibly hand over his assets to Freeman and Moss because he simply didn’t know where they were. Some of those assets include his Manhattan penthouse, a famously immovable object, as well as his Mercedes convertible, which he was seen driving in Florida on Election Day. In response, Judge Lewis Liman said that the idea that neither Giuliani nor anyone else in the world has knowledge about the location of his assets was “farcical.”

And Giuliani’s own legal representation in the Freeman and Moss case ditched him that same month, declaring in a motion in federal court that they had reached a “fundamental disagreement” with the ex–New York mayor.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has ordered Donald Trump to be sentenced for the 34 felony counts in his hush-money case on January 10, before his inauguration.

In an 18-page decision filed Friday, Merchan denied Trump’s request to vacate the verdict and dismiss the indictment. Merchan made clear, however, that he had no intention of sentencing Trump to jail time, fines, or probation.

“While this Court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and Defendant opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the Court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration,” the filing said.

“A sentence of unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options,” the filing continued.

Trump may appear in person or virtually, according to the filing, and must respond by January 5.

In November, Merchan granted Trump’s application for a stay of sentencing, but made no mention of throwing out his felony convictions, which seemed to signal that Trump’s sentencing would be canceled indefinitely if not until the end of his four-year term.

The following month, Merchan ruled that Trump’s guilty conviction would stand, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said about immunity. Trump absolutely lost it, calling Merchan a “radical partisan,” even though he’d previously railed against critics who claimed judicial decisions were political. Of course, Trump was only referring to judges who rule in his favor, such as Judge Aileen Cannon, who helped him sidestep charges of mishandling classified documents.

Trump was charged for falsifying business documents to cover up a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, to conceal their affair ahead of the 2016 election. Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers in May.

Should the sentencing proceed as scheduled, Trump will officially enter the White House as a convicted felon.

This story has been updated.