Transcript: GOPers Suddenly Fear MTG Is Creating a New Mess for Trump

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 10 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.

These are heady times for MAGA. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elon Musk are teaming up to slash the government to ribbons as part of Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency. Marjorie and Musk, what could give MAGA a bigger thrill than that combination? But Politico now reports that some Republicans quietly fear this could backfire. They believe Greene will become a distraction from the Trump and GOP agenda of spending cuts and shrinking government. Distraction is Washington speak for disaster. As it is, putting Musk’s right-wing “techbro” worldview anywhere near serious governance is already dangerous, but throwing in MTG could make it even more combustible. And this could have major implications for all of us. Today, we’re trying to make sense of all this with tech writer Gil Duran, who closely tracks Musk’s machinations. Thanks for coming back on, Gil.

Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Musk heads up this new Department of Government efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump created this body, and Musk seems to think that he’s going to figure out how to find enormous spending cuts that Congress will accept. The role is advisory, but Musk seems to be taking the role very seriously. You’ve followed him a long time. How do you think he views this? What does he really expect out of it in his head?

Duran: Well, he views it as a tremendous way to get attention, which is one of the primary things he seems to be after on a daily basis. Elon Musk has to be the center of attention at all times. I also think that he is a bit naïve going into this because cutting government is not as easy as posting memes about cutting government. There’s a lot of cuts that if you start making them—especially if you’re trying to hit some $2 trillion crazy goal—that are going to hurt people, that are going to turn the politics against you, and that are going to result in a very short career in Washington.

I think he takes it seriously. I think he views government as a butterfly whose wings he can easily pull off. I think he’ll find that it’s a lot more complicated and dangerous than that.

Sargent: No doubt. Now Marjorie Taylor Greene enters the picture here because she’s heading up a new House subcommittee focused on DOGE. That’s the Musk outfit. Politico reports that some Republicans privately think that House Speaker Mike Johnson just put Greene there as part of a deal in which she gets this plum post and that insulates him from MAGA challenges to his speakership. But Republicans really think this is going to become a distraction. Where do you see this going? How do you see Greene and Musk working together?

Duran: Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a ticking time bomb. With Elon Musk in the mix, you have two ticking time bombs together. The first thing that tells me about DOGE is that this is going to be crazy town. Greene has no filter and no standards, and Musk and Trump are planning to make this as outrageous as possible with little concern for public opinion. Marjorie Taylor Greene being included is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

The plan here is to make this little experiment as dramatic as possible. The goal is also to weaponize government. Greene is a rabid partisan. She’s not some respected legislator known for her well-measured views. She’s a fountain of conspiracy theories with a real knack for going viral and making news for the worst possible reasons. So they’re really going to go after anything perceived as liberal or democratic. They’ve accused Democrats of weaponizing government, but that’s actually what they plan to do. And they’re going to try to do as much damage as possible.

The other thing I would say about including her is this is going to be extremely volatile. They’re packing a lot of massive egos into this operation. None of these people have shown a great ability to play well with others. There’s a high possibility this all goes very wrong at some point.

Sargent: It’s true that both Greene and Musk are prone to a certain type of out-of-control conspiracy theorizing that could be really volatile in this situation. Any time that anyone comes up with some theory about some governmental body, no matter how outlandish, it can just suddenly be turned into a justification for eliminating it. It seems to me that Republicans, at some point, are going to have to deal with that, right? Greene and Musk using their immense platforms and their immense popularity with MAGA to turn the MAGA masses against this or that thing in government that Republicans secretly don’t want to cut—it seems like a problem, no?

Duran: Definitely. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not really a politician. Neither is Elon Musk. These people are walking, living memes, and one of them is the richest man in the world, who famously said that empathy is evil. If you have no empathy and you have no experience in government, you don’t know what you’re doing. These Republicans very much have to worry that the destruction that Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene cause will cost the Republican Party heavily in a few years.

There’s nothing that suggests they will be doing things that are somehow political winners. You can’t cut $2 trillion from federal government and not have some blood flowing somewhere. Republicans would be right to be worried. Part of the calculation here is that adding Marjorie Taylor Greene to the mix will make it more likely to fail more quickly.

Sargent: There’s this interesting synergy here between Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, which goes as follows. Republicans are all required to pretend that Musk’s panel is a real thing. You can see them going through these motions of meeting with him and saying, That was a very important meeting. We discussed some very really critical issues. Same with Greene. They all have to pretend their subcommittee is a real thing, that they’re going to take its recommendations very seriously. But at some point, there’s got to be a collision between appearance and reality. Musk and Greene are going to presumably come up with some actual recommendations, and at that point Republicans are going to have to deal with it, right? Then what happens?

Duran: Everything in Washington is a negotiation. There will be some cuts proposed that will be popular. There are plenty of government expenditures that voters might consider unnecessary or wasteful—I know this from experience. In 2011 and 2012, I worked with Jerry Brown when he was governor of California, and we had to cut billions from the state budget because of a deficit. You can cut extra cell phones, wasteful fleet spending; we banned government employees from going on out-of-state trips for conferences. These were all very popular, but they don’t really add up to much. To get to $2 trillion, you’ve got to cut deep into programs that people in both blue and red states care about.

I can see this being a big exercise where they get some good press for rooting out some owl fertility study that people think is stupid, that may actually be very important to science for some reason, and getting some popularity out of it in that way. But when the rubber meets the road, I don’t think Republicans are going to want to cut Social Security and other things that matter because Elon Musk puts them on a list. He’s not the power in Washington. They have to tread carefully because he’s so wealthy, but nobody who’s in politics wants some outsider calling the shots. He’s going to find that the knives are out for him in the Capitol.

Sargent: What happens, though, given that he and Marjorie Taylor Greene are raising these expectations big-time among MAGA? Clearly, Republicans are afraid of Trump voters at least to some degree. Musk, his own ego is on the line here in a big way, right? There has to come a point at which Republicans essentially say, No, we’re not doing that, it’s too crazy. Then what happens, given the high expectations of the MAGA masses? Where does that go?

Duran: He might get mad and pout. I don’t know that people will be paying too much attention, to be honest. They could just create some other frenzy around some other issue and pretend that they cut $2 trillion and the MAGA base won’t know any different. They’re very good at pretending they’ve done things they haven’t done. But most of these government commissions ... This is not the first time a politician has had a government efficiency commission that’s going to make a bunch of recommendations. They typically end with nothing much really happening.

The other part of it is there’s some severability here because Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene can take the fall. We see the story announcing her involvement is a negative one, about how it’s a bad thing. So there’ll be plenty of leaks. The narrative will be that Elon Musk has no idea what he’s doing and was going to cut things that were going to hurt Republicans, hurt farmers, hurt businesses, and hurt schools. And the Republicans will have a way out. They’ll try very hard to do a lot of damage, but the calculus you have to make is whether you cut off your own nose to spite your own face.

Everyone talks a big game about cutting the government. No one has really done that in Washington for a very long time. So it’s not clear that it’ll happen now because that’s what some South African billionaire wants.

Sargent: And House Speaker Mike Johnson is not going to want to imperil vulnerable House Republicans in marginal districts. We still do have elections, I think. There will come a point at which Republicans will have to offload the damage onto Musk. You’re right that we’re going to see leaks of all kinds, which essentially say things like Musk and Greene didn’t have any idea what they were talking about. They already really despise Greene; many of the Republicans do anyway. Musk is in for the same treatment.

Duran: Definitely. His money gives him an extra power, but you can do a lot hidden behind the scenes. The other risk he runs is he’s trying to get so much attention. Trump’s not going to like that. Trump is not the kind of guy who likes to live in other people’s shadows. There’s a book called The 48 Laws of Power that’s a famous compendium of ancient and time-worn rules and politics and power. Rule number one is never outshine the master. Never make someone like Trump think that you’re actually the boss. And Elon Musk has done a lot to give the impression that somehow he’s going to be at the right hand, that he’s in control.

Sargent: There is a real ideology of sorts in the background behind all the craziness. This is something you’ve talked about at some length: the right-wing “techbro” universe. Clearly, Musk, and MAGA to a lesser degree, despite the administrative state have hitched themselves to Trump. They see Trump as a charismatic, and I guess personalist is the term, leader who can carry out right-wing red-pilled agendas without the impediments and without the petty nuisance of bureaucrats getting in the way. Can you talk about that broader ideology, this “techbro” hatred of the administrative state? Where does it come from, and what’s its real purpose?

Duran: These men are very wealthy and very powerful, but government is more wealthy and powerful. Elon Musk is a billionaire, but government is a trillionaire. Governments can fight wars; Elon Musk can’t. Government can put you behind bars for your crimes; Elon Musk can’t do that. Not yet, right? If they can destroy the power of the state, then that power will be in their hands. Right now, they see rules and laws as a threat. Supposedly, they’re libertarians, so that means you’d want to eliminate these regulations and laws for everybody and do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Balaji Srinivasan, a tech and crypto figure who has been influential on people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and others. He has this whole philosophy of how tech bros have to take over the government or create governments of their own. This idea is called the Network State. One of the things he said that has come back into my mind recently is that government is a trillionaire, and what you really have to do is find a way to get that pipeline of money and redirect it away from the liberal social welfare state and toward hypercapitalism because that’s the best way forward.

So what they’re not going to do is cut government to the bone. You’re going to see a lot of privatization, which has also been a long-term goal of the Republican Party. They want to privatize prisons, the military industrial complex, space travel, education, you name it. This will make a lot of them super wealthy, and perhaps eventually, if they win, make a few of them trillionaires. Because that’s the goal now: to not be billionaires but to be trillionaires eventually. Privatization is very much part of it. It’s about redirecting that money and redirecting the power of government into private hands.

Sargent: It’s important to clarify that people like Musk and Andreessen and Peter Thiel and all the right-wing tech oligarchs are not really libertarians, they’re authoritarians. They have a vision of a rule by natural elite, natural aristocracy, and hypercapitalism is that, in their view. Government is just pesky mediocrities, bureaucrats, woke delusional liberals getting in the way of their greatness, basically. Isn’t that right? Can you talk about that element of the vision, and how it’s not really libertarian, it’s authoritarian?

Duran: Yeah, it’s definitely authoritarian. It’s an ideology of supremacy: the supremacy of the wealthy over everyone else; the supremacy of the male over everyone else; the supremacy of white, for the most part, over everyone else; the supremacy of men over women. This is why they have so much in common with Trump’s Republican Party because it is also an ideology of supremacy and of hierarchy. And there are ways in which they diverged. I don’t think Elon Musk really has anything common with your average MAGA voter in rural Kentucky where I have family. I couldn’t see Elon Musk lasting five seconds in a conversation with some of the Trump people I know there. He wouldn’t be interested. But they have enough in common on this higher level that they are in this temporary alliance.

I know some people are feeling really defeated and scared, thinking, No, they won. This is it. I don’t think we’re there yet. There’s a lot of volatility in this alliance. I think after a year or two, the American people are going to be looking for a different direction, one with a bit more stability and a bit more thoughtfulness in terms of how we build toward the future, one that doesn’t involve weakening the public good, weakening the U.S. government, and weakening the United States of America at a very dangerous time in the world, which seems to be on their agenda.

Sargent: You can see one way that this unfolds. As people like Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene start rolling out these batshit crazy ideas that would cut things in government that people actually like and depend on, all of a sudden Trump starts to look like he’s just not at all in control of anything anymore. With him being in power, he takes the blame for other stuff that’s going wrong outside of government and so forth. What ends up happening is a view crystallizes of Trump, as he really is, which is completely incompetent and so caught in his own pathological hatreds and delusions that he’s just not able to govern at all. And then the Musk and Green stuff feeds into that and reminds people why they like competent public servants, why they like government that actually works, and why they like government. That, I think, could fuel the desire by voters for a new direction.

Duran: Definitely. A lot of what government does is protect people from private greed, the kinds best symbolized by these empathy-free billionaires. People will come to their senses at some point if they try to go too far and overreach, which I think that they will. Nothing lasts forever. In my experience in politics, voters will often want one thing and then want another thing very soon after that. So getting that calculus right and not getting thrown out of office very quickly or becoming unpopular is the art of politics. If you’re Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, you have no handle on that part of it. Trump, at any time, can throw them out the door.

If there’s one saving grace we have right now in Trump, it is that he’s not loyal to anyone. He puts himself first. Now, Elon has a lot of money, and that’ll help him stay in there a bit longer because Trump is loyal and lustful for money. But over time, there’s some real danger in Elon Musk trying to take this too far because it’s Trump who will pay the price. Elon pays no price; he’s just making more money every time he wakes up. Trump, though, will pay a price. If they fail at this and if they go too far, the pendulum will swing the other way and they will find themselves at the receiving end of that which they tried to deliver onto others.

Sargent: I do think that you could really see these guys recommending the privatization of all sorts of government functions that people like and them just thinking, Let’s just turn it over to the natural elite to handle from now on, i.e. the oligarchy, and that really causing a public backlash.

Duran: I remember on the first day of Political Science 101, a professor said, Politics is who gets what and when. These billionaires want everything, and they want it now. But the government, this public institution we built, belongs to the American people. I don’t think they’ll take it away so easily.

Sargent: To bring it back to Marjorie Taylor Greene for a second, you can see what Musk sees in her, right? Musk clearly sees Trump as this incredibly charismatic figure who can be in command of enormous masses of people in a way that even Musk can’t be. So Trump is a vessel to carry out whatever ideas Musk has for the future. Greene is a little bit similar in that sense, right? Marjorie Taylor Green is a tremendously charismatic figure; maybe not super competent when it comes to public service, but she can command masses. Musk probably sees that as useful. He thinks she can be part of his team of government by charisma as it is, right? Government by online charisma is what they’re trying for. That creates the potential for a whole lot of disasters down the line.

Duran: The business of government is very deeply involved in the everyday lives of people and their health and their safety and their futures. This is not time to be turning government into a meme. This is not some kind of joke. And they’ll learn that the hard way. Marjorie Taylor Greene is someone who’s willing to go along with anything and who has no regard for her image, her popularity. She’s a mad dog. That’s who she is. But when you lie down with dogs, you get the fleas. There’s a really high chance this doesn’t end well.

To be a good politician, you have to be very aware of the dangers, you have to be wise, and you have to be judicious. I don’t see any evidence that these people are at all aware of those concepts, and they’re about to try something that no one has tried and that no one has done. I don’t think it’s going to go very well, and I would be really shocked if, in a year or so, this isn’t something that Trump has dismissed as a joke. You make some cuts, you move on, you pretend you did it. That may very well end up being what’s going to happen.

If they do cut $2 trillion from the government, we’re going to have a massive recession, possibly a depression. People will be jobless and hungry and standing in lines for health care, for food, for everything. We’ll be like Argentina if they devalue the dollar to go deep into crypto. And then they’ll be on midnight planes to Russia along with people like Assad. Again, there is a big danger in going too hard at trying to destroy the United States of America. I know Elon Musk’s ego is big, but I’m not really sure he’s willing to accept the consequences of a swing and a miss here. The chances are really high that’s what will happen.

Sargent: It sure looks that way. Gil Duran, thanks so much for talking to us today.

Duran: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.