On Dec. 19, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) floated the idea of Elon Musk being the speaker of the House after the billionaire tech businessman publicly opposed a bipartisan bill to avert a government shutdown.
As crazy as that might sound, some fellow Republicans support the idea, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.). She said that she would be open to supporting Musk for speaker, an idea proposed by other Republicans as Congress barrelled towards government shutdown Friday night.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also endorsed Musk for speaker, though he added that he would also be happy with Musk’s partner in the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, taking up the role. He told talk show host Benny Johnson, “Let them choose one of them, I don't care which one, to be their Speaker,” Lee said. “That would revolutionize everything; it would break up the firm.”
And, of course, Democrats were outraged and started trolling President-elect Donald Trump by calling Musk the “real president.”
“The US Congress this week agreed to fund our government,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Wednesday. “Elon Musk, who became $200 BILLION richer since Trump was elected, objected. Are Republicans beholden to the American people? Or President Musk? This is oligarchy at work.”
Recently elected Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) wondered to reporters on Thursday: “If Elon Musk is kind of cosplaying co-president here, I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office, or Speaker Johnson should maybe just hand Elon Musk the gavel if they just want that billionaire to run the country.”
According to CBS News, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) joined the fray, repeatedly invoking “President Musk” while speaking with reporters on Thursday.
“Welcome to the Elon Musk presidency,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) wrote on X.
The concept of Musk for Speaker of the House is surely intriguing, evoking two questions:
- Is it legal?
- Has it ever been tried before?
The answer is yes on both counts.
On the first question, the U.S. Constitution does not require the speaker to be a member of Congress, although historically, every Speaker has been a House member.
As to whether it has ever been tried before, the answer is actually yes. For example, former Secretary of State Colin Powell was nominated in 2013 and 2015, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Wis.) and Joe Biden were nominated in 2019.
It's certainly an interesting concept, but it hasn't happened yet.
We’d like to know what our readers think.
- What do you think about the idea of a speaker who is not an elected member of the House?
- Does it bother you that the richest man in the world with no elected experience can be speaker of the House?
- Given how dysfunctional Congress is, might it be a good idea to shake it up from the outside?
- If Musk became speaker, might that intimidate Trump? Could Trump handle becoming what some think could be a figurehead president, subservient to a younger, richer man? The balance is certainly complex, as is the relationship. Trump has already said he’s the man in charge. How will their dynamic evolve?
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.