RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
MELBER: “Yeah, and it speaks to the governing style, where they don’t want to deal with Congress, even though they have a bare majority there. They don’t want to take the time. They don’t want to do the compromise. People forget, okay, it’s one party. But even within parties, there are different views about how to do things. There are committee chairs. There are people who have their own elected power, and they’ve not talked about the inaugural speech, didn’t have a big congressional agenda. Trump’s not doing much about Congress except saying, approve my people. And Musk reflects that because, again, he had a little dry run over the funding at the end of the year, and it didn’t go so well for him. And so what they’re trying to do is see how much they can push and break things and what the pushback will be. And so they’re on the same page right now. But if that pushback fails, excuse me. If that work fails and the pushback constrains, I’ll give you one headline on the citizenship. The rule of law is something Trump sees as an impediment to his goals, something to navigate around or simply ignore personal gain. There’s now a national judicial order blocking that effort. Musk is doing things that are getting trimmed in the courts. If this all fails and Musk is getting too much attention, then a couple of weeks from now, you could see a shift away from this trial and error strategy.”
Johnson: “Well, yeah, here’s the thing. Musk is a business person, right? He’s been able to sell us on anything he can, you know, sell ice in the winter and fire in hell, whatever it is. But he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he never has. He never has. He doesn’t actually understand governing, as you mentioned before. And so what you have is someone who is simply breaking things because they think that’s cool. And you have several members of Congress, not just Republicans, but also Democrats who are finally figuring out when you’re dealing with people who don’t want to govern, they just want to break, you have to find a way to fight back. To me, if we were to read a headline tomorrow, Ari, that Mark Cuban was running the personnel office under Vladimir Putin, we would say it’s insane. That’s basically the same thing here. Just having a rich guy who’s your friend come in and run the government is not the way things work. But my concern is, even if Donald Trump were to say, okay, that’s enough, my ego has been bruised enough. Musk has put so many complications and firewalls in our national security systems, in our treasury system, and everything else like that. You might not be able to remove him. There may be backlogs and all sorts of technical things in there that allow him access in ways that we never would have imagined. And that’s the long-term consequence of either an ongoing coup or just massive mismanagement or unfortunately, both.”