Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 12/20/24

Joe Biden is still president, but you wouldn't  really know it. Elon Musk and his partner, the President-elect Donald Trump are making it  clear that they are already in charge. Musk, the world's richest man, is also the most  powerful man in Washington right now.

We'll explain how this came to be, next. Good evening and welcome to  Washington Week. Everyone's favorite subject, government shutdown, is  on the table this week, as is the role of Elon Musk in the coming  administration.

Also in the news this week, Donald Trump's desire to  prosecute Liz Cheney for investigating Donald Trump. Joining me to discuss  all of this, Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent for NPR and  co-host of the NPR Politics podcast. Mark Leibovich is my colleague and  a staff writer at The Atlantic, Ashley Parker is a senior national  political correspondent for The Washington Post and Vivian Salama  is a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Thank  you all for being here. The topic is Elon Musk. I want you all to  watch a clip from Rosa DeLauro, the, the Democratic.

congresswoman from  Connecticut, um, which will give you a sense of what people are  saying on the hill and off this week about this new Mar a Lago dynamic. The Democrats are in the minority  in this body. When you have the pen, which is what the Republicans  have.

They write the bill. They write the bill, they post  the bill. They agreed on a bill.

And you know what? They got scared. Because President Musk.

Told them. a mask said. Don't do it.

Don't  do it. Shut the government down. Asma, how did um Elon Musk become  seemingly the most powerful man in Washington.

It's an excellent  question, especially for a man who historically had not been heavily  involved in American politics, but the brief story is that this  summer he became the wealthiest political donor that we have in the  2024 election cycle. He invested, I believe it's over $270 million  about quarter of a billion dollars in this race to help Donald Trump.  and Republicans get elected.

Fast forward, Trump wins. He is appointed  as an adviser to the president-elect, so he's in this unofficial position,  but he's on, you know, phone calls with world leaders. He's  there advising the president, you see image after image, photo after  photo that's taken, Musk is sort of just behind Trump in all these  pictures and what we saw happen this week is that Musk, put out  a series of tweets blasting this short term spending bill, and you  saw a whole bunch of.

Republicans line up and say that no, they're no  longer going to support the bill, but look, I will say I think what  is extremely unusual about Musk is it's not just money that he has,  he has ownership of a major social media platform, X, which he owns,  and he's able to utilize that and he has hundreds of millions of  followers there, right, uh, Mark, you're the premier anthropologist  of Washington Mores. Folkways I prefer mores and folkways, um, have you ever seen anything like  this? a figure like Musk plays such a determining role.

And by the  way, an administration that hasn't even started yet, noting, yeah,  no, not at all. And I think what's interesting about Musk is one, he's a  new character that's been introduced into the sitcom, and I think like  the whole trope of his sitcom, a Washington presidency as a TV  show is obviously probably overdone and it's also, it's diminishing of  the seriousness that we're dealing with, but Elon Musk is a new  character. Donald Trump loves new toys.

He loves new partners and especially  loves to be seen in partnership with someone who was richer than  him, who was richer than anyone in the world, and he's unpredictable,  and I think to some degree, he's part of the, the, the, the drama  in which everyone sort of analyzes the relationship. I think people  like Rosala DeLauro and Democrats think that they can make great shame of Donald Trump by calling  him, you know, Vice President Trump to Elon Musk being the president,  but ultimately I think he's something that will probably wear thin at a  certain point and we're all sort of. Well, that's the question,  Ashleigh, I wanted to ask is, is, you know, Everybody has a half-life,  like a radi radioactive half-life with Donald Trump.

Every relationship  has a half-life. Um, when And obviously people like Rosa DeLauro,  Adam Kinzinger, others on social media and off are sort of playing  up this. Oh, he's the real president as a way of like needling  the actual president-elect.

Is this a stable relationship? Turning  to you is like the relationship columnist of our panel today. I, I'm a woman No, because you're acute  observer of human interactions, but I mean, how long does something  like this last?

And I was just asking someone in Trump world this,  and they said that's the $64,000 question, but I think the answer  is twofold. On the one hand, these trolls, right, the way people get  crosswise with Trump is when they begin to eclipse him, right, the  death knell, the beginning of the death knell for Steve Bannon was  when he appeared on the of time, that's a magazine that only Trump  should grace, right, and that kind of begins the descent, um, the flip  side is that as Mark said, Elon Musk has something that Trump doesn't,  which he is incredibly wealthy. He is much more wealthy than Trump  and what Trump does not like is when he believes that people are  profiting off of him, right?

That they only got a book deal because  of their proximity to him or because the way he set them up in his  administration and what Trump recognizes correctly is that with or without  Donald Trump, whether or not he's sitting on the patio of Mar a Lago  or not. Elon Musk will still be Elon Musk. He will still have his  billions of dollars.

He will still have his social media platform.  He will still have all his other very successful companies, and  that I think is the thing. There is a half-life, but I think that is  the dynamic that potentially extends that relationship much longer than  you might otherwise let me ask this of both of you and and Vivian, uh, who needs who more in this relationship. 

Does Donald Trump need Elon Musk more than Elon Musk needs  Donald Trump. You choose it out who goes first? Honestly, it's hard to  say.

I mean, Elon Musk is an outside, you know, we have to remember that  even though he will be playing a role in the future Trump administration.  He's actually on the outside. He's already uh a self-made  billionaire.

He has a lot there that he doesn't have a lot to lose at  this point, um, and so I don't think that um he necessarily needs Trump,  whether or not Trump needs him. That's also debatable. I mean, Trump  has his base is following.

That 270 billion that Ozma was referring to a million, which by the way, Elon Musk has, he's  worth 400 billion, that certainly didn't hurt. That certainly didn't  hurt. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think Elon in certain ways needs  Trump more in the sense that Trump gives him this agency doge right? 

Trump gives him entree to government when he's not an elected official,  doesn't really know the federal bureaucracy. The flip side is I  think when Donald Trump tires of Elon and chooses to crush him,  like he has the loyalty of the MAGA base. Trump can successfully banish  Elon, but the difference is when Elon is banished, he goes back to  being Elon, unlike some of those other people like a Rex Tillerson  or someone else who ends up banished and a bit diminished.

Right, right.  No, I, I, uh, I, I find it hard to believe that the relationship  ends well, in part because many of Trump's relationship don't end  well, but staying on the subject of what Eli wants. Obviously, as, as important  as Tesla is to him and Starling, um, His, his space business is  hugely important.

And so I'm just wondering based on reporting, based  on informed speculation, Mark, is there, is there a long term play  here for Elon Musk, uh, to basically become the space czar of of America.  Is that what's going on here? I'm just trying to figure it out. 

Yeah, I don't, I mean, I think he could be the port, the space  czar for America now if he wants to be. I do think, I mean, the  other piece of what maybe he is a space he is holding up the  announcement. appropriate time.

Um, I mean, he does have all these  governing contracts. That's the other part of this. I mean, he  controls huge aspects of the government and the government funds a lot  of him, but I don't, it's hard to think of someone who is worth that  much money relying on a government contract for livelihood in any  way.

Look, I think these are not. I, my, my sense is these are  mercurial folks who are not thinking long term. They are just sort of  having fun at this moment, and I don't think anyone really as one  does with the presidency, but look, I mean, I don't think anyone  seriously thinks that this is going to be the dynamic in play in 2  years, even if it's not the dynamic in play in 2 years.

I just do think  if you like sit here for a moment and look at it, this is like an  astounding thing to see someone who is the wealthiest man in the world,  never elected into any position in government, but has a major  Platform and can ostensibly kill a piece of legislation in a day.  Well, and this is one of a piece of, I mean, this is one of the factors  that I think has made people around Trump very uneasy in the last couple  of days because one of the remarkable things about his campaign this time  around was it's discipline. The fact that they were able to kind of  control the messaging, keep Trump on message to a certain degree and also control the people who  kind of got to him and suddenly in the last 48 hours, we have seen  uh two bills actually.

implode in a in a GOP-led House by Elon Musk, essentially because of a tweet that could  actually 92 tweets in uh in the course of a 24 hour period, and Trump was  silent for about 12 of those hours when Elon Musk first began. And  so there's so many questions about what was going on behind the scenes.  Why was Elon given carte blanche to go out there and say those things. 

I mean, the thing about Trump, and this was true in the first term,  is that this dynamic has always existed, right? Everyone wanted  to be The last person in the room because they would often persuade  him and I remember at one moment right near the end of his first  term, he's considering pardons. He's on Air Force One with a group of  reporters, and he asks us, is there anyone you need pardoned?

And you  sort of got the sense that if you had an uncle, right, whose name  you're like, yes, sir, this man was, you know, wrongly imprisoned. He  would have done it, and that has been a challenge throughout the  administration. I remember another person saying it's one thing people  love and hate about him.

It's very populist. If someone is in there  who has no and policy experience, but they're in the oval for foreign  policy debate. He will turn to them.

He will ask their opinion, and  he may weigh it just as substantively as you will the opinion of his  general and so Elon is just as Mark said that the latest character and  sort of outsized because of his presence, because of his platform,  because of his money, but this is a very familiar dynamic for  anyone who has studied or covered Donald Trump. I want to note for  the record that we're going to spend the last 10 minutes of the show  pardoning people. So at the end of the year, I'm just feeling that I'm feeling that I'm feeling that.

I'm feeling  that mood. Anybody you guys have, just let us know. I want to  note that something else.

something else that Musk tweeted  yesterday, um, was an endorsement of a far right German political  party. Only the AFD can save Germany, he said, and, and the AFD is, this  is Germany we're talking about. This is a, this is a party that is  not dissimilar in some ways from um more uh antique fascist parties  of, of, of Germany and it's, it's so far to the right that other  far right European parties try to stay away from them.

I'm wondering  what this is a very serious. subject. What that means for the, the, the,  the, the global dynamic if Elon Musk is sitting right next to Donald  Trump and telling him how great this extremist German party is,  what does that hold once, what does that hold for us once Trump actually  assumes office.

I think there's a lot of unknowns about what it  will mean for once Trump, you know, actually takes power, but I think  at this point you look at Elon Musk, he is one of the people who  at this moment in time seems to have the ear of the president-elect  in a very unique way, right, on calls with foreign leaders. That's  not something that traditionally somebody who doesn't have the  expertise of governance normally does, and look, whether or not he falls  out of vogue or out of fashion with Donald Trump. I do think  there's this moment to sit and wonder like what does this mean?

For the  health of of the American democracy as it's known because we look around  at other countries, right? We, we're talking about this earlier,  like people will say, oh, Russia has oligarchs, Russian oligarchs,  and we think that in our country it's somehow unique or that sort  of it doesn't have the same system, and I think there's a moment to  sort of sit around and say, well, this is actually extremely unprecedented  to this degree to see somebody who is so wealthy in an unelected  position have the ear of the president in such a way. It's also not  surprising to see people in Trump's orbit embracing some of these.

right wing governments. You saw Trump himself  has supported Hungary's president, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who's  right wing, um, he has supported Le Pen in France, who's a right wing  politician. He has invited Argentina's populist president to come and  attend the inauguration, and that then he said, OK, so I mean I do  know these are people that he has traditionally embraced and so  Elon Musk is kind of taking a page from that.

To be fair though, that  AFD makes the president of Argentina look like Elizabeth Warren, you  know, I mean, these are. Absolutely, absolutely, and I have to tell  you, I, you know, I sent the tweet, Elon's tweet to a top German  official to ask, you know, what their take is, and I got sort of a shrug  emoji back because they are trying to make sense of it themselves,  they themselves are trying to make sense of it so no, no, no, it's  all, I mean, it's just worth noting for the record that the most influential  private adviser to the president-elect of the United States is endorsing  a German fascist party, noting for the record for future discussion.  Vivian, I want to turn to you because there's another friend of  Donald Trump, who's been active according to your own reporting,  Tucker Carlson, another private adviser, um, you had a pretty big  scoop about his ability to, uh, Squash Uh, nominations.

Could you  give us a little bit of what you discovered this week. So Tucker  Carlson, who for folks at home who have forgotten the former Fox News host,  um, uh, and right wing commentator, um, is a regular at Mar a Lago,  speaks the president-elect pretty regularly and as part of that sphere  of influence that we're talking about here with Elon Musk and  others, where he has managed to be very influential with the  president-elect, and in this case what I was talking about is, um, the  case of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former CIA. Director  as well, who was a shoo-in up until almost election day to be Secretary  of Defense, according to a number of people who are close to Trump,  but Tucker Carlson, who has long hated him, believes he is quote  evil, says he's a warmonger, a neocon even just a traditional Republican,  has made the case to Trump that bringing him back into the fray  would be a terrible mistake.

He also is convinced that Mike Pompeo  tried to assassinate Julian Assange among other accusations, and so  Trump Unsounded accusations unfounded accusations, and so, you know,  um, Don Junior, uh, Trump's eldest son, also kind of pushed the idea  that some of these neocons who turned against Trump in the  previous administration, you know, a lot of the national security folks  who came out later and said he was unfit to be president. They  linked Pompeo to that, and Trump listened. Mike Pompeo's out. 

Ashley, I want to talk about another Republican who's in disfavor with  the MAGA forces, um, this. week, House Republicans issued a report  calling for Liz Cheney to be investigated by the FBI who's future leader  could be Kash Patel, a very strong loyalist of Donald Trump for her  role in the investigation of January 6th. So is this um is this rhetorical  excess, or is there something more here?

Well, again, this to me  is one of the open questions because Trump says and does and threatens  a lot of things, and he doesn't do. all of them, but he does do some  of them and what the Republicans did was sort of served him up on a  platter, a road map for potentially going after her should he choose.  And if you just look at his comments, he's still kind of been all over  the place.

On the one hand, he sort of said a version of people are  saying, right? Like, people are saying she really should be looked into. Well,  those people are House Republicans and they're doing it because they  believe they have gotten wink wink nod nod signals for you to do it,  but he's also said he doesn't want to look back to the past, so it's  sort of a Rorschach.

for where he is and, and, and where we go  when he actually becomes president, right, Mark, I want to ask you  about Joe Biden. Remember Joe Biden, um, President of the United States  for another few weeks. Um, a lot of coverage in the last week or two  about uh including the Wall Street Journal, uh, his, his limitations  that were showing themselves his intellectual limitations or or  cognitive limitations, that the, the, the age issues, um, coming out  long before this past summer or the debate on June 27th.

Um, uh, you  were warning early about Biden's age. Um, is there anything surprising  coming out to you now, or is this kind of uh a story about a  group of people around Joe Biden covering up for him. I mean, I'm  not really surprised.

I mean, I'm surprised to the degree to which  he is completely disappeared since the election. I mean, I guess it's  sort of obvious that a lame duck president by definition will not be  a factor, especially when someone who has such a big footprint as  Donald Trump is waiting in the wings. I do think that there's a lot of  sort of unfinished reporting done on this, which I think is going  to come out around what this White House really did look like, and is  that a failing of the media over the last few years maybe, but I  also think, you know, there was a very serious effort to protect  him and to shelter him and to keep him away from cameras and to keep  them away from situations where this would be exposed and and  look, is it a scandal?

I don't know if I'd use that word. But I also  think it is a massive source of, you know, information that we're  still trying to understand, right, um, Mark, let me stay with you.  I wanted to ask, um, since we're coming to the end of the year, I  wanted to ask you all, um, veteran political analysts as you are,  uh, to talk about the things that actually surprised you.

A bit,  um, over this last year. Mark, let me start with you. What was the,  there's a lot of surprises this year, but what's something, what's  something that really struck you as, uh, that's unusual.

Yeah, I,  I mean, I think one of the things that struck me was, I mean, the  sort of sprint to the election that the Kamala Harris, you know, Tim  Wall's campaign ran. I was surprised by, first of all, I thought Kamala  Harris did a nice job. I, I think Tim Walls was a good, you know,  pretty good candidate, but I was surprised that they sort of landed  on the politics of joy, which struck me as one of the most  fundamentally sort of bad misreads of a political moment, you know, in  a long time, which is, you know, this is not a joyous moment in the  American economy, in the American sort of mood in general and it  was, it struck me as something that was tone deaf and something that  that when I heard it, I was thinking, oh, I don't know if this is going  to work at all, and I don't know if they thought this through, and  so I guess I would say that my surprise from the last year is  the politics of joy being a thing because it struck me as misguided, right, Vivian, what,  what, what was something that, that really struck you as, um, unusual  or just you weren't expecting.

Um, well, I told your producers, I  don't know if this was too obvious, but, um, Donald Trump getting shot  this year was mind blowing for a lot of us who have covered him  for years, but not only that, the way that how he narrowly escaped  death. I mean, literally by milliliter millimeters, um, and a head turn. It was, it was a head turn that that  saved his life, and it is pretty extraordinary, and we went just  from that extraordinary moment to 2 days later, the Republican  National Convention, um, which took on a completely new mood, catapulted  his candidacy, um, and he was already doing well.

Joe Biden was  still in the race at that moment and so his, his polling was still  was still fairly, was still fairly good, and he was in the lead, but  to see the enthusiasm behind his candidacy after that. Um, it was  really just an extraordinary moment in American history. Asma, what about  you?

Equally perhaps unsurprising, but covering the Biden with campaign,  which then became the Harris campaign for me which the moment  that was just so surprising because I genuinely didn't think it was  going to happen was when Joe Biden officially dropped out of the race.  Why didn't you think it was gonna happen? For a couple of reasons.

One is, I, I will say one is that the  campaign and the White House was so insistent it was not going to  happen. Secondly, I think that the moment in which it happened, I  mean, keep in mind this was after he had already debated Trump after  the RNC had taken place about the end of July. It was so late in  the season, um, that it just seemed like it was not a recipe for  success for the Democratic Party to take place at that moment, um,  but I also just think there there is this sense that Biden has often  had that he was the man, the ultimate man.

He said this. He thought this  that could save the day and do this job, and he felt he was the  best equipped man to do this. I remember I asked him at a presser why  he did not stick to his commitment to be a bridge candidate, and he  said essentially the circumstances have changed.

So I just felt like  there was such an insistence, even after the debate, which is what he  said about the pardon of his son, also the circumstances, the  circumstances have changed, so I just think it was so shocking the fact that  he did it initially by a statement while having COVID. Uh, the moment  that it happened, the time that it happened, frankly, the that it  even happened, you know, it's so interesting, not as shocking as an  assassination attempt, obviously, but the, the fact that the debate,  if that debate, the first debate had happened in September or even  October. Joe Biden would have had to have been the candidate running  against Donald Trump.

We'll never know it's alternate history, but  just the, the, the, the, the, the scheduling of that debate is actually  one of the most important facts in modern American political  history. I mean, I remember I had to write like you know everyone writes  their pre-write stories and all editors make you do. I pre-written and I did one of those and I remember  after the debate, the editors are bugging me on vacation.

Edit,  fix your story, fix your story, and I was like, no, no, it's not  gonna happen. And lo and behold, you know, people I think generally  people should listen to editors, but that's just me, um, Ashley,  what about you? Uh, since everyone has taken the good ones, I will just  go meta and say what was surprising to me was how surprising and  exciting this race ended up being.

I was sort of of the view of the  American public that this was kind of going to be a slog. It was the  exact same two white guys fighting over more or less the exact same  issues. They were just both like 4 years older, and then for  all the reasons they stated, everything just got up ended  in this wild, wild way, right, right.

That, that was, I  mean, I guess the, the, the surprise, was it at all surprising to anyone that Kamala Harris didn't do well. Or is that baked into this? Was it a surprise that she did or  didn't do, did not do well, like did not win any of the swings. 

That would be, that would have been one of mine, I thought she was  gonna do better. I mean, I, I might have drank too much, sort of like  lead up to the election Kool-Aid and wasn't smart. You were so joy  filled, I was condemning the politics.

Let's get this on the record,  joyously though, I mean, look, I just thought I'm actually, I, I mean,  I was at a lot of her events. I mean, they were very spirited events.  There were big crowds and everything.

It felt like something was  happening. Also in the final days, it felt like there was a tiny bit of  momentum for her, especially with women voters, and so they thought  maybe she'd get some a bit a bit better. Well, we, unfortunately,  we do have to leave it there for now.

It's a very fascinating  conversation. I could go all day, but we can't. But so I want to thank  our panelists for being here and for sharing their reporting, and I  want to thank our viewers at home for, for joining us all year and  from all of us here at Washington Week, we want to wish you the happiest  of holidays.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.