How Musk Can Kill Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill 

The Beltway concluded that Donald Trump won the fight picked by former First Buddy Elon Musk.  

“Republican lawmakers are making clear that, if forced to choose, it’s Trump—not Elon Musk—they’re sticking by,” reported Politico. “Trump Has Leverage Over Musk,” observed The New York Times, pointing to the president’s control over federal contracts and regulation. “Trump also has something Musk does not have, which is the votes of 77 million people and a MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement behind him,” concluded The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, who also noted Musk’s threat to punish Republicans in primary elections if they vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill doesn’t pack much punch since his money was for naught in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election. 

Musk would surely lose any popularity contest with Trump among elected Republicans and the MAGA rank-and-file. But that doesn’t mean the tech mogul still can’t hit Trump where it hurts: right between the Bs of the One Big Beautiful Bill.  

The conventional wisdom that Musk has lost all of his political clout was articulated by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Balz: “As a practical matter, he’ll have almost no impact on the legislative process … Had Elon been capable of listening and going slower, he would have had enormous impact. But it’s not who he is. Had he matured into a serious commentator and implementer, then he would have had enormous influence.” 

Gingrich, who loves the word “enormous” and has always had an enormously inflated sense of himself as a conservative visionary, seems to have forgotten some basics. The legislative process is influenced by patient listening, but more often by moneyed demagoguery. That happened in 1994 when he teamed up with the health insurance lobby to kill Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan.  

Thirty years ago, the insurance lobby poisoned the well of health care reform with a $20 million ad campaign featuring a fictional middle-class couple, “Harry and Louise,” drowning in bills because Bill Clinton’s plan had been enacted. First Lady Hillary Clinton, who led the effort to design and pass the plan, responded with broadsides against the insurance lobby, and the insurance lobby responded with more ads, injecting panic among Democrats that “HillaryCare” was a political loser. As a result, neither chamber ever even voted on the Clinton plan. (One of the reasons why ObamaCare fared better in 2009-10 was that the pharmaceutical lobby ran an ad campaign reenlisting the Harry and Louise actors in support of reform.) 

Musk has far far more than $20 million in the bank. If the Space X, Tesla, and X CEO wants to stop a bill he calls a “disgusting abomination,” he’ll use that money.  

Musk needn’t spend millions on futile primary challenges or an even more futile project of creating a new political party. He needs to flood the media ecosystem with ads that tear the One Big Beautiful Bill into a million shreds.  

Various pockets of the GOP are already uneasy with the bill, and it won’t take many disaffected Republicans to kill the measure. The House barely passed a compromise bill, and Senate Republicans immediately began finding faults. 

Right-wing fiscal hawks like Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky want far deeper spending cuts to offset the budgetary impact of the bill’s tax cuts; Johnson has said the bill must return the federal government to a “pre-pandemic level of spending.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and others have complained about the House concession to blue state Republicans that increases the cap on the state-and-local tax [SALT] deduction. The Medicaid cuts in the House bill have rankled moderate Senator Susan Collins of Maine and populist conservative Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. While the House Freedom Caucus demanded a fast phase-out of clean energy tax credits, which began under President Joe Biden, some Republican senators, such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, represent states enjoying the jobs those credits support. 

A Musk ad campaign could hammer the bill’s vulnerabilities and fray the tenuous GOP coalition. In this Trumpian era of political shamelessness, Musk need not be intellectually consistent. He could run ads in swing states and congressional districts, fomenting outrage over the millions of Americans at risk of losing health insurance from deep Medicaid cuts. He could also run ads in devoutly conservative areas, livid that the bill doesn’t cut spending and adds trillions to the national debt.  

An overarching theme would emerge: the One Big Beautiful Bill is a Frankenstein patchwork that doesn’t satisfy the GOP’s stated goals. After all, Trump promised not to touch Medicaid, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, promised he wouldn’t increase budget deficits. Yet this bill cuts Medicaid and increases budget deficits, even when factoring in economic growth. 

Musk does not need to attack Trump in any ad. Among Republicans, Musk would lose any popularity contest with Trump. Trump’s best chance of passing the bill is making it less about the legislative text and more about fealty to him. The president will take any opportunity to draw attention away from legislative sausage-making and steer attention to his culture war topics. How convenient that immigration officials are rounding up undocumented workers and triggering street protests when there is a 1,000-page bill to pass. 

Musk’s own X posts over the weekend suddenly became obsessed with celebrating Trump’s unprecedented military crackdown in Los Angeles protests, leaving behind his withering assessments of the One Big Beautiful Bill. That could mean Musk is like the rest of us and is easily distracted, or it could mean Musk is trying to mend fences with Trump. Whether he wants to direct his energies to killing the bill is unknown.  

But if Musk believes it’s a “disgusting abomination,” he can and should do something about it.  

Gingrich’s advice to be serious, slow, and open-minded about implementation applies to anyone trying to build. But when it comes to government, Musk has been in the business of destruction (except when accepting lucrative contracts). Taking a wrecking ball to the One Big Beautiful Bill would dwarf his DOGE chainsaw antics. He can easily convince a sufficient number of Republicans that supporting the bill is political suicide.  

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