Donald Trump, in a month to the day, will be installed in command of the United States and he will do as he pleases, no one doubts it. It is already a question of seeing the sulfurous appointments to his cabinet that he continues to promote. He will be the most powerful man in the world. The most influential? Not sure!
Normally, I wouldn't spend more than thirty seconds describing how elected officials in the US Congress manage or fail to agree on a temporary budget. It has become an obligatory passage, a melodrama played out every year on the edge of the precipice that would be a shutdown of the federal government, a paralysis of the services and agencies of the American state.
If I say a word about it this time, it is to highlight how the first version of this budget bill ended up in the dustbin of History. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, had nevertheless followed the traditional route towards a solution: negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, compromises which never quite please anyone and, generally, a vote of approval allowing unblocking the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to operate the federal state.
The «No way!» of the future president
Donald Trump opposed it, saying there was too much “excessive and ridiculous spending” and demanding that the bill include a lifting of the debt ceiling, which would allow him to spend as he pleases once at the end of the year. power.
More remarkable, in fact, is that before Trump's loud disapproval, Elon Musk had brought out the heavy artillery, bombarding the budget bill with a volley of messages on his social platform old Twitter – to denounce the orgy of spending that would result from the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans.
Faithful to Donald Trump's rants, Elon Musk's messages – more than a hundred in X – relayed several misleading assertions: that elected officials had voted for 40% salary increases, false! That three billion dollars were allocated to the construction of a football stadium in Washington, false! Musk also responded “YES” to a message proposing to “Shut down the government until January 20th.” Remove all funding. Everything will be fine for 33 days. False, too: according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the shutdown five weeks of 2018-2019 resulted in an economic loss of approximately three billion dollars.
Much more than a simple citizen
That said, what should be noted is the phenomenal influence that Elon Musk is accumulating. Already the richest man in the world, he owns, with X, the loudest social speaker on the planet, amplified by his own megaphone of 208 million subscribers. Next to Donald Trump, newly elected president, there is no one else with as much ascendancy. Think about it for a moment!
Elon Musk was already the most powerful person in business, the most powerful in the media and, as we see it right now, the most powerful man in politics, all without having received a single vote in the last American election. We would see it as a form of coup d'état that would hardly be exaggerated.
Elon Musk, anything but an ordinary citizen
And he's only 53!
* Top adviser to Donald Trump
* Secretary of the brand new Department of Government Efficiency
* Manager of four companies:
– Tesla
– SpaceX
– Neuralink
– The Boring Company
* Father of twelve children, eleven of whom are still living, aged between a year and a half (Techno “Tau” Mechanicus) and twenty years old (twins Griffin and Vivian Jenna)
* His fortune, estimated at 440 billion US dollars, makes him the richest man in the world and one of the richest of all time.
