Rep. Mike Johnson is Learning the Hard way that Republicans Now Live in The United States of Musk

Mike Johnson and Republican elected officials are learning that their Faustian bargain for power now means they serve two masters: Donald Trump, a criminal, and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth.

(Jean Catuffe/GC Images/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

It’s good to be the richest man on Earth.

You can spend nearly $250 million, create your own super PAC, and help elect a corrupt, criminal vulgarian to office who will then turn around and let you steal all the cookies from the cookie jar.

You can take over Twitter, rebrand it X, and transform what once was a reliable source for breaking news and social justice organizing into your personal propaganda playground to bully your enemies through an army of hatemongers, white nationalists, MAGA bots, and deluded incel fanboys who think they’ll get to date you one day and have one of your babies to repopulate the Earth for your Alt-Reich technotopia.

To sweeten the pot, you can decry spending which is a necessary function of the government without reminding people our government has spent our money to make you rich through subsidies. Without a trace of irony or self-awareness, you can be charged along with another billionaire to curb government spending and excess. You can also brand the non-government agency DOGE which, coincidentally, is the name of a cryptocurrency, which is just the latest vehicle of the rich to get richer as the rest see our dead presidents fleeing our wallets upwards to 1%.

Speaking of dead people, your rich friends can exercise all their power and influence over media and elected officials to ensure the country, nay, the world, stays obsessed over the targeted murder of a health insurance CEO whose company denied health care coverage to millions of Americans while ignoring the numerous school shootings that take place almost weekly in this violent country which has more guns than people. Since money in politics is polyamorous, the NY Governor has set up a “hotline” for CEOs who are now frightened after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, but no such hotline exists for children in elementary school who must endure shootings like what happened at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin on Monday.

With Trump in power, you can now openly flaunt your obscene influence and control over one of the major political parties that has already bent the knee to one tyrant and will now have to obey your whims and dictates via tweets as well.

You can have the Republican leader of the House, the masochist known as Mike Johnson, appear on Newsmax and brag that he’s on a text thread with you and Vivek Ramaswamy as a means of placating the infuriated MAGA mob that routinely terrorizes a Republican party that helped feed, empower, and unleash it in the first place.

But it’s still not enough. It’s never enough for a movement fueled by power, greed, and cruelty. They want more. The belly is never satiated.

Now, Rep. Johnson must appeal to Democrats to help prevent a government shutdown and pass a stopgap measure to keep federal offices running until March. Federal government funding runs out at midnight Friday. This is the only country in the world where one of the major political parties hijacks the country and the government to fuel its incessant cultural wars by refusing to pass an annual appropriations bill that is needed to fund important federal agencies, such as, you know, the Pentagon and other services that control our transportation, health care, and welfare programs. Small stuff, really. The current 1,500-page bill which will increase spending also includes the first pay raise since 2009 for a Congress which is largely loathed by a majority of Americans. It also allows members to opt out of ACA. In a classic Fuck Around and Find Out moment, some Trump voters realized after the election that Obamacare is the same as their beloved ACA, which Rep. Johnson promised to repeal after Republicans took power.

Whoopsie.

Oh, Republicans. Woe is you. Your Faustian bargain with Trump and Musk for the sake of power, wealth, and access means you now have to spend the rest of their lives with a target on your back. This is me playing the world’s smallest violin. For simply trying to do his job, Rep. Johnson, like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan before him, is being pilloried by the MAGA base. Steve Bannon has now thrown Johnson under the bus, accusing him of now being a Democrat for trying to keep our government running.

I know I can be a bit hard on Republicans, so let me extend them an olive branch during this holiday season and give them a sincere compliment. The GOP is a fantastic opposition party. They are very skilled at throwing sand in the gears, working the refs, bullying institutions, playing the victim, and with the help of “moderate” Democrats stifling the Democratic agenda. They are exquisite trolls. The best trolls. They exist solely to “own the libs,” and they do a fantastic job at it. Unfortunately, they now have power, and what they’ve shown consistently over the past 50 years is that they are a terrible governing party. They are great at shit throwing but they are awful at actually managing a country and helping the American people.

The one thing they can be counted on is ruining the economy for the sake of giving tax cuts to the rich, de-regulating industries and making the rich even richer.

The hoods are off and there’s no need to cosplay anymore. They belong to Trump, Musk, and their merry band of billionaires.

Unfortunately, it’s up to the rest of us to continue being rational, empathetic, and responsible adults who must resist and move forward without government subsidies and fewer dead presidents in our wallets.