I don’t know if anyone had this on their post-2024 election disaster bingo card, but currently, it feels like Elon Musk is kind of running the country.
Just ask Mediocre GOP Speaker Mike Johnson. The poor guy thought he had a spending bill that would keep the government open. Nice win for Mike, or maybe not!
Elon said nope, sorry, not happening, Mike. He went on his hellsite, X, and spent hours spreading misinformation and bullying on millions-dollar playground, and effectively cowed Republicans into killing the bill.
If you woke someone up from a long coma and told them about this, they would assume that Musk is the president, and when you told them that he isn’t, the next question would be well where is the actual president then? Fair question but right at this moment, who knows? Biden seems to be missing in action during all of this. Not sure if it is his health, or if it’s another example of insistence on paying attention to mores and gentleman’s agreements like it’s 1996.
This is apparently what Musk paid for. After claiming he’d wasn’t making large donations to the GOP and Trump back in the summer, it turns out that he was to the tune of $277 million. He also ran what was likely an illegal election lottery, if you remember, handing out million-dollar prizes to lucky MAGAs in swing states.
Elon does all this, you see, because he can. It turns out that sneering at people warning he was dangerous because the system, you see, will shut him down hasn’t worked. So from what I am seeing from the usual suspects, that has transitioned to nothing really can be done, often because we have to protect the system that enabled it in the first place, and it was foolish to believe that the system would protect us in the first place.
This is of course really bad and we now have a shadow president, and by that I mean Trump, not Elon. Mr. Musk is right out in front, pulling the strings, hiding behind the curtain be damned. Getting back to killing that spending bill, that flopped kind of hard. Which is good for…kids with cancer:
Thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Republicans cut $190 million for pediatric cancer research from the funding bill.Congrats to DOGE on their first victory.
— Sawyer Hackett (@sawyerhackett.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T21:43:10.289Z
Get this, 38 Republicans voted against it. Poor Mike Johnson, he has to manage a real president and a shadow president, plus his crazy party.
Republicans fail to pass a bill to keep the government open that they negotiated with themselves after detonating a bipartisan deal that they had negotiated with Democrats
One of the two Dems who voted for it was Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who sometimes votes for horrifying things like dumping funding for cancer kids because she has to in order to win in her district. Which, while probably true, is not really ideal, right? Speaking of Dems, there is a silver lining here in that Democrats seem to have coalesced on a message, which is mockingly referring to Elon as President Musk, which no doubt drives Donald mad and also is a good message to voters.
A new hotness among Republicans is suggesting a non-Congresscretin as Speaker of the House. This all started a little while ago with the idea of Donald Trump as Speaker of the House during the Speaker Games, when the GOP were at each other’s throats about who would be elected Da Speaker. Eventually we got Mikey but now the non-Congresscretin as Speaker of the House suggestion is none other than President Elon.
The guy getting this ball of crazy rolling was Rand Paul, the senator who was not beaten sufficiently by his neighbor. Crazy loves crazy so Professional Wacko Margie Taylor-Green immediately jumped on board, no doubt making Speaker Mike a little nervous.
Nothing is impossible in the glorious world we are living in (note: Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet) and so yeah, I would not dismiss it. There are of course the entire rules of succession stuff in case Trump’s heart does us all a favor by just giving it up already, given a non-citizen is not supposed to be able to be president. If we get Speaker Elon I’d be nervous if I were JD Vance.
But on the other hand, why would Elon want that? He’s already more or less our president, and in his ketamine-addled mind, he is invincible. Plus, that would be a lot of work, right?
Stay tuned. This next season of The United States of America is living up to expectations, even if many of the extras do not seem to think it will.
The last word goes to Pink Floyd.
“Mediocre” is far too generous.