STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Jonah Goldberg has been listening with us. He is editor of The Dispatch and an occasional guest here. Jonah, welcome back.
JONAH GOLDBERG: It's great to be here.
INSKEEP: What do you think about when you hear Elon Musk lashing out this way?
GOLDBERG: Well, I was introduced as an expert on all forms of abomination.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
GOLDBERG: And...
INSKEEP: That's true (laughter).
GOLDBERG: Abomination is actually a Hebrew word, and it means an offense to the Jewish faith or to the dictates of God. And not to traffic in really gross and base stereotypes...
INSKEEP: Oh, please, go right ahead, please.
GOLDBERG: This bill is not frugal.
INSKEEP: OK.
GOLDBERG: It would be an offense to Sid Goldberg, my father, for its lack of frugality. So - look, it's a hot mess. And I think that what Musk - when I listen to Musk doing this, you know, the play - they start - the music from Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," starts to ring in my head.
INSKEEP: OK.
GOLDBERG: I think that Musk and Trump like each other, but more importantly, they really like using each other. There's that old proverb about how it's hard to ride a tiger because eventually, you have to get off, and that's when the tiger is going to eat you. They've been sort of taking turns, piggybacking with each other for a long time. Trump loved to have the world's richest man sucking up to him and doing his bidding. Musk loved all the access to the White House and the profile, and apparently wanted to stay. And the Trump White House was like, no, this is - apparently, this is - enough is enough, and sent him packing. And so now Musk gets to revert a little bit back to his globalist, libertarian roots and is, I think, generally right about the bill. I wish he would stop saying it's because it's full of pork. It's got a lot of pork. Again, it's an abomination. It's not kosher.
INSKEEP: OK.
GOLDBERG: But it's got - the real problems are sort of the level of the tax cuts, combined with the continued entitlement spending in a climate where interest rates keep going up, to the point where we are approaching the point where just interest on the debt - interest payments on the debt alone will be, like, the second-largest outlay by the federal government by the end of the decade, if not sooner.
INSKEEP: Yeah, that - the numbers don't add up, which is why you can have Democrats saying these are terrible cuts that are going to hurt people and, at the same time, Musk saying you're going to borrow enormous amounts of money. But when you talk about the Neil Sedaka song "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," Musk was really important to the Republican coalition. Now we have senators like Kevin Cramer, a Republican from North Dakota, who's been on this program in the past, saying that Musk is amusing, but we're serious policymakers, meaning we can disregard him. Can Republicans disregard this man who spent so much in the last election?
GOLDBERG: Yeah. You said I was a longtime observer of Washington. I missed all of these serious policymakers on Capitol Hill.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
GOLDBERG: I'm like, where did they come from? Look, I - look, I think this is - the Trump coalition is really, really weird, right? It's got a lot of old-style, normie Republicans who, you know, think they're supposed to be vulgar and crude these days, but still, in their hearts, are - want to be more like Reaganites. You got a lot of nationalists. You got a lot of techno - you know, Silicon Valley bro types. You got a lot of young, disengaged, working-class people of all races. That is a weird coalition for Republicans to hold together. And right now the thing that holds it together is Donald Trump's cult of personality and hatred of his enemies. And that is not - that's not a coherent, philosophical approach to governing or politics or anything like that.
And so one of the things I think of when I watch, you know, this play out with Elon Musk is that this is the beginning of sort of the MAGA mosaic crumbling a little bit. We could look back on this three years from now, two years from now and say, yeah, that fight between Musk and Trump was the beginning of this. But now look at how, you know, pro-lifers are doing this. Trump is going after the Federalist Society. You know, there are a lot of constitutional conservatives who are going to say, look, that - this is my red line. And I think it just highlights how fragile and jury-rigged the Trump coalition has always been. And given how narrow the numbers are in Congress, that creates real peril, right? I mean, I still think this bill passes, but I'm less confident of it because Musk is providing one of the factions in the GOP cover to bail on it. And in - not only just in the Senate, which hasn't voted on it yet, but there are people in the House who are coming out, saying, hey, I didn't know this stuff was...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
GOLDBERG: ...In here. I want to rethink.
INSKEEP: Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example. Jonah, thanks so much. Really appreciate your insights.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of the conservative news site The Dispatch. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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