Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

In short order, it seems, we will learn what kind of country we’re going to have for the next four years. Within the short span of 24 hours, Elon Musk has shown us how he and Donald Trump see the future of our government. Trump didn’t really have an opinion of the bipartisan bill Speaker Mike Johnson and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries pushed through to fund the government until March 14 by Continuing Resolution until Musk popped-off on X yesterday. At 1:17 p.m., Musk Xeeted, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” At 2:13 p.m. Musk was back with this: “No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero.”

At that point, not-yet-president Trump jumped on board, screaming, “Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF. It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief.” Then, out of the blue, came this: “The most foolish and inept thing ever done by Congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025. It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed.”

Debt ceiling? Huh? Every congressperson walking around the Capitol at least half-vertically thought until that moment the issue was funding the government until Trump gets in office and will tell them what to think and do.

But not Trump. He already has his eye on his monciferous tax cuts and knows they’ll be a budget-buster and need a double-monciferous jump in the debt ceiling if they’re ever going to pass. So what does he do?

After doubling down and calling the funding bill “unacceptable” and “a Democrat trap,” Trump called the richest man in the world, the one who paid $250 million to get him elected, and this is what he says he said to him: “I told him that if he agrees with me, that he could put out a statement,” Trump said.

This seems like an unnecessary point to make, but I’m going to say it anyway: This is two men, two billionaires, one real and one self-professed, one of them an immigrant from South Africa, telling the United States Congress what to do about how it funds the government. Trump even threatened Speaker Johnson, telling him on Fox News that he will “easily remain speaker” if he “acts decisively and tough” and gets rid of “all of the traps being set by Democrats” in the bill to temporarily fund the government for the next three months.

For his part, Musk went further, telling House Republicans and members of the Senate that he thinks it would be a good idea to shut the government down completely until January 20, when presumably, he and newly-inaugurated President Trump can sit down and decide what kind of government we will have.

This has never before happened in this country. We have never, since our founding nearly 250 years ago, had a situation whereby two men who do not hold elective office are telling those who have been elected what to do, and threatening to oust them from their elected positions in the Congress in two years if they do not follow orders.

Donald Trump is not rich enough to make this threat and follow through on it, but Elon Musk is. Every member of Congress and the Senate saw what Musk did when he spent $250 million of his own money to elect Donald Trump. Every member of Congress and the Senate knows that Musk could have just as easily spent those same millions to defeat Trump.

To have that sword of Damocles hanging over your head is apparently more than the Republicans in Congress can handle, because as we speak today, the bill to fund the government lies in limbo as Speaker Johnson tries to figure out a way to please his masters, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

This is not what the Constitution says about how our government is supposed to work. The Constitution sets forth a system by which voters—that would be us—elect people from the 50 states to go to Washington, where paying at least some attention to what the voters want, pass laws that delineate the government and fund its work. The Constitution establishes the executive branch, overseen by the president, also elected by a vote of the people, to run the government the Congress has established and funded.

This is generally the way governments are established and run all the way down the line in this country, from states, to counties, to cities, to townships, even down in small towns like the one I live in that has less than 1,000 adult residents.

Nowhere in our nation, through the state constitutions and the documents which establish county and city and town governments, is there a single clause that says, in effect, everything works this way, with elections and votes by Congress and state legislatures and county boards of supervisors and town councils, except when two unelected billionaires say differently.

I attended a meeting of our town council earlier this year to speak on behalf of a resolution establishing gay pride month for the town of Milford. The members of the council sat at tables formed in a semi-circle, and they heard speakers on both sides of the issue of the gay pride resolution, and then they voted. The council does the same thing when it considers how money should be spent to fix the town’s roads, how many trash cans each house may put out on the street to be collected and what size they must be, and a hundred other issues.

At no meeting of our town council has Elon Musk or any other billionaire stepped in and told the members of the council how to vote and threatened that if they don’t vote his way, he will see to it that they are not reelected when they run for office again. That’s not the way the democratically elected town council of Milford, Pennsylvania works, and it should not be the way the elected Congress of the United States works.

Because if this is the way Donald Trump and Elon Musk plan on running the government of the United States starting on January 20, then we won’t have a democracy. What we will have is some hybrid of a dictatorship and plutocracy, whereby the elected representatives of the people forfeit their powers and duties to the whims of two people: one who gives the orders, and the other who pays the money that will ensure his orders are carried out.

This is serious business. I think we are lucky that the issue of the passage of a continuing resolution to fund the government has arisen with a very short deadline, because that fact has presented the country with the example of how Trump and his henchman Musk intend to run things when Trump takes power in January.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are essentially ordering the Congress of the United States to suspend the Constitution and obey them. Until this moment, we did not have a my-way-or-the-highway government in this country. I suggest that we should pay very close attention to how the issues of the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling are resolved, because in the next 36 hours or so, we will learn what kind of country we will live in for the next four years and perhaps for many years after that.