This is an excerpt from an article on Heather Cox Richardson’s substack.

. . . .What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”

Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his [whole] term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.

Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.

"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.

But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”

Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.

Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president. . . .

Why we are running this excerpt:

      My wife and I are with one of our children on the island of St. Barths, where I should be thinking about Emerson’s wonderful line about warm weather: "Man in summer is man intensated.”

      I should be noting the casualness with which women are excluded from such aperçus. I should be trying to figure out why spellcheck doesn’t recognize “insensated. And I should be deciding if I ought to aim for “insensated,” during this Caribbean idle or whether merely “laid back” will do.

      Instead, I’m noting that most of the tourists here are younger and richer than I. And I’m thinking (our fate for the next four years?) about Trump and Musk.

      The latter—the thinking not the election—is in large part Heather Cox Richardson’s fault.     

      I know many of you subscribe. (If not, that can be rectified (for free) here. We try to keep excerpts from articles that have appeared elsewhere to a minimum. And she is not even a member of our age cohort.

      But she can make our situation—our ridiculous and frightening post-election situation—so damn clear. . . .

—Mitch Stephens