Elon Musk in the Oval Office

This is a Global Player original podcast. At a high level, if you say, what is the goal of DOJO, and I think a significant part of the presidency, is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback loop, FBX, we'd have to… Sorry. I tell you, gravitas can be difficult sometimes. So, if there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? That is the unelected billionaire standing in the Oval Office, holding court to journalists, with Donald Trump at his side and a fidgeting toddler by his knees. He's telling us what democracy looks like.

So, the easy joke is the toddlers have taken over the White House, but we're not going to make that joke. Instead, though, there is a fundamentally much more serious question about accountability, about what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, and whether they are just simply ignoring the law of the land.

Welcome to the News Agents USA. It's John. It's Emily. And I was utterly transfixed watching the parade of Elon Musk, ex-his son, as opposed to the social media platform, and Donald Trump, this trio sitting there in the frame as the snow is gently falling outside the Oval Office. I'm thinking, this is all nuts. And, also, Elon Musk holding court and Donald Trump just looking up and sitting silently while Elon Musk held court. And it tells you something of the power relationship that exists between the two of them. It also tells you, to some extent, the way Donald Trump is playing with fire because you don't know what Elon Musk is going to do next.

Yeah, I mean, he's the man who's appointed by Trump to lead the cost-cutting department. He's not elected for the role. He is essentially mounting a hostile takeover on hundreds, thousands of people's jobs, on dismantling federal agencies, on stopping money going to aid and aid causes right around the world. And he's now lecturing the press on why it's important to get rid of the bureaucrats because America needs to reassert its democracy.

And the serious question at the heart of all this is, are they trying to upend what democratic accountability looks like? If you are the executive, if you are the president, do you just say, it all rests with me? I was elected by the people. Therefore, everything I do comes as a mandate from the people. You don't need representative democracy anymore. You don't even need the rule of law. You don't need Congress. You don't need legislature. You just say, in its finest, purest form, I was elected by the American people. I won the popular vote. I won the electoral college. I can now do what I want. And my friends, importantly, can also do what I want.

Yes. It's the idea of what they call unitary executive authority. The idea that the executive, the president of the United States, is the only person that matters in the Constitution. Yeah. And that the other bits of checks and balances, the Congress or the legislature or the judiciary, the courts, have no role to play. Trump is testing that constitutional theory to destruction, almost, it feels like at the moment, where he is pushing so hard and so fast about, you know, budgets that have been approved by Congress, and it's Article 2 that says that they shall be approved by Congress, are now being ripped up to government departments because Elon Musk has gone in and said, oh, I've turned over this rock, and there's an awful lot I don't like underneath it, so let's close the department down, which is broadly what has happened with USAID. He's possibly going to go on to the education department next, and after that, you know, he said he's going to go into the Pentagon, which is obviously the huge behemoth in all of it, because it's got something like a trillion-dollar budget.

And so it goes on and on, and there is no line of accountability, apart from Elon Musk is doing it at Donald Trump's behest. There is no way of holding Elon Musk to account. There is literally no process where Congress men and women, senators, whatever, can call him and say, you've got to come before our committee and explain what you're doing. And this, to much of America, is going down really well, actually. It's really worth saying that, that these two have gone in and said, it's crazy the amount of fraud we're finding. Can you believe we're funding LGBT theatre in Ireland, or whatever, the thing that they found that they think makes the point whether or not it's true is.

And there was a moment in the room where a reporter asked Musk about all the things that he'd made up, that he wasn't getting right. The $100 million Hamas condom fund. And Musk has to say, well, you know, OK, I didn't get all of it right. Can you correct the statements, it wasn't sent to Hamas, actually, it was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense, why condoms were sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct, so we can trust what you say?

Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody's going to bat 1,000. We will make mistakes. Let me just describe the scene. As he is explaining that they make mistakes, his son is now on his shoulders, pushing his black MAGA cat down over his eyes, and Elon Musk is trying to respond to the reporter's question, admitting that they did make a mistake, as well as taking his toddler's hands off the cap so that he's not blinded by what is actually happening on top of his head.

In case you missed the essence of that, he's saying, yes, I got that wrong. I muddled up two places called Gaza, one was in Mozambique and it was an anti-AIDS programme. And he's saying, we will get corrected and we will come forward. He's not coming forward, he's having that pointed out to him. He's actually having to accept that they make huge mistakes along the way because they're not checking any of these facts, they're certainly not pausing to look at where the AIDS is going to, they're just going headlong for the cuts and letting everyone else pick up the pieces.

Well, are they making mistakes or are they just being disingenuous? Are they just making stuff up because it's good propaganda? Yeah, you have to ask, would they want the con artists to go to Mozambique anyway? Probably not. Although I think it's very understandable that you would mix up Mozambique and Gaza because they're right next door to each other. They're not. They're both in Africa. Oh, they're not both in Africa, yeah. But, I mean, you know, clearly, look, they were absolutely called out. The reporter had him absolutely banged to rights and he goes, yeah, yeah. Well, we're going to make mistakes but, you know, people have got to go over it. But right now I've got a kid trying to, you know, mess with my hat. So, sorry, I can't give him...

The other thing I think we should say is this was the week that bribery came back into fashion. We saw Donald Trump pardon Rob Blagojevich, he's the former Illinois governor, a man who served eight years in prison for corruption. The Department of Justice has now suspended the New York mayor, Eric Adams, for allegedly soliciting bribes. And meanwhile, Trump is firing the director of the Office of Government Ethics. So, you have to re-enter this inverted world where if you are looking into cases of corruption or bribery, you are probably going to get fired. If you're espousing corrupt practices or bribery, you'll get elevated and called a hero, pardoned from your past deeds. He has now directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That essentially prevents American officials, American businesses from bribing foreign officials. So, if you are running an American business now, you go ahead.

You pay whatever you need to get your real estate passed. You pay whatever you need to clear the way for you to do business all around the world. The Corrupt Practices Act is no longer being enforced. Imagine the messages that is now sending out.

You know, we were talking the other day on the podcast about the retreat of American corporations from DEI policies, diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And, you know, a number of companies have done it, Accenture the latest. There are others as well who've kind of retreated in various aspects of that too. And we talked about that and thinking, you know, corporate America is waiting, all right. Presumably, they are now going to be sending out an additional memo to all staff saying, whilst we've also shelved all our DEI policies, it's OK. You can now bribe public officials if you want to get a contract for our company. So that's OK if you want to take a counselor and give him $10,000 worth of X or put him on a private plane to Y or any of those things. It's all OK. And it's all being done under the badge of. Well, hang on, I'm sorry, the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act was making America uncompetitive. And we need to be competitive with all the other countries that don't pay a blind bit of attention to this idea.

And that is turning the clock back on years of trying to root out corruption in public life. It's a really interesting thing, isn't it? If there are no guardrails on American businesses, if you're encouraged to go about your business by paying whatever bribes you want, do you? Does it change the ethics at the top all through the company? Because I guess, you know, the one thing Trump's not being is hypocritical. He's a transactional narcissist who's worked out that actually bribery and corruption has probably served very well for the Trump empire in the past. And why wouldn't you? That's how you get things done. It's something that affected every business, every local politician.

Could you accept hospitality from this one or that one? You had to declare it. And, you know, and that's part of British public life as well now, that you cannot just willy-nilly accept. And you look at all the, you know, the scandals that there have been involving politicians and how whether you're accepting Taylor Swift tickets or whatever it happens to be, it's all got to be declared. It's all got to be above board. And you thought... Which it was. I mean, that stuff all was declared, right? So we're not even talking about stuff that's been accepted undercover.

But you think of going back to British politics, the scandal there was at the time of the Blair government and the Thatcher government over the Saudi arms deal, the al-Yaman arms deal. And Blair stopped the serious fraud office investigation into that because of the damage it was going to do to Saudi-UK relations. Donald Trump is now in a position where he's saying, look, if you want to bribe people, it's absolutely fine. And we're going to stop... I mean, the case against Eric Adams, who is the mayor of New York City. Now, the prosecutors thought they had an absolute slam dunk of a case against him. The evidence was stacked up. That case has been stopped. It's just politics. You know, Eric Adams, presumably a good guy, gets business done, a bit transactional, maybe takes, you know, but let's get on with it. That's where America is going and going fast.

Now, the interesting thing about all of this is the extent to which there is very limited opposition to Donald Trump. It feels in the media that he's not doing that much holding to account or from opposition politicians. It is just the courts. The courts are now the bulwark against this kind of accretion of power by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to do whatever they like. And I guess the big question is, what happens if the courts rule and Donald Trump says, I'm going to ignore what you've said?

Well, I wonder if we can play you this clip from J.D.

Vance made several years ago when he said, we will upend the stuff that doesn't work. The courts will try and stop us and we'll just railroad on past it. Do we have a constitutional republic? The founding fathers actually created a very powerful chief executive, a very powerful president. But if he can't even fire the people in his own administration, like, is this really a successful republic? So a lot of concerns have said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think he'll probably win again in 2024. And he'll win by a margin such that he will be the president of the United States in January of 2025.

I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. Because this is, I think, a constitutional-level crisis. That has come to pass, because the courts have stopped Donald Trump from freezing the U.S. aid. The question is, what happens now?

OK, that was J.D. Vance before he was vice president. J.D. Vance, as vice president, at the weekend said, if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. That is J.D. Vance saying Donald Trump can do what he likes. The theory would then be that the U.S. Marshals Service goes into the White House and says, Mr. President, you're under arrest for disobeying a court order. Is that going to happen? Not a chance.

In a moment, we'll be talking to Seth Harris. Now, he was the deputy director of the Biden White House's National Economic Council, also acting United States Secretary of Labor under Obama. He's been thinking quite long and hard about what these changes and what executive power now looks like in America in 2025. We'll be speaking to him next.

Well, joining us now is Seth Harris. He is the distinguished professor of practice at the Northeastern University. And as I was saying just before the break, he's worked for Obama. He's worked for Joe Biden. And he has been right in the heart of government over the past administrations. And, Seth, I was just looking at that picture of the Oval Office press conference today where Elon Musk is being sat on by his own toddler. Donald Trump is at the desk beside him. The press are around him. And Musk is holding court about the dangers of unelected bureaucratic officials. Where do we start?

Let me just say, first of all, it's an immense pleasure to be with both of you. And thank you for having me on. I watched some of that press conference and my irony button was on overload the entire time. Elon Musk is essentially the shadow president, at least with respect to government reform. He's operating entirely behind the scenes. There is no transparency with respect to what he is doing. And so, to some extent, yesterday was his coming out party. And one thing that we know about Donald Trump is he doesn't really like other people stealing his spotlight. So, it's possible, I don't want to say this for certain, but it's possible that yesterday started a clock that will measure Donald Trump's patience with Elon Musk. Now, Musk is creating the one thing that Donald Trump most wants, and that is chaos. There is immense chaos in Washington, D.C.

There are a lot of very upset people. There are a lot of very disrupted people. There are people losing their jobs. There's billions in spending being kicked around. The Constitution is being threatened in a number of ways. That is the milieu in which Donald Trump loves to operate. And Musk is the principal source of that disruption.

Isn't the fundamental kind of issue here, though, the dilemma, is, yeah, chaos. Yeah, pushing the Constitution to its limits. Yeah, unaccountable. But the American public are loving it.

I don't know that we know the American people are loving it. At a very, very high level, the American people want to see disruption. But when you get into the details of what Musk is doing and a lot of what Trump is doing, I think we're going to see rising frustration among the American people. And here's why.

First, at a very high level, what you have going on in Washington is two billionaires beating the hell out of working people. Now, those working people happen to have as their employer the United States government. But these are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. These are people who go out and make sure that our meat is safe. These are people who go out and make sure our Social Security checks arrive on time. These are people who keep our workplaces safe. These are ordinary working people, and they are being beaten about the head and neck by two bosses, billionaire bosses, who are engaging in absolutely the worst behaviors that we see among bosses in capitalism, including union busting, which is a high priority for both of these men. They both hate unions, and they're both going after the federal employee unions.

I think that once that story gets repeated and repeated and repeated, I think there's going to be a lot of frustration with that. But at the bottom, this is not what people elected Donald Trump to do. Elon Musk said yesterday, this is what people voted for. This is not what people voted for. They voted for Donald Trump because they mistakenly believe that he is a talented economic manager. None of this is going to bring the price of eggs down. None of this is going to result in people getting good quality middle-class jobs. In fact, Trump's economic policies, combined with the layoffs of thousands or tens of thousands of people from the federal government, is going to do damage to the American economy. And so I think we're going to begin to see frustration build.

Now, it's only been a few weeks, and, you know, there's sort of a shock and awe aspect to this. But I think the American people are going to get very frustrated with this very quickly.

That might be in the medium or longer term, Seth, if that message is even allowed to get out. But in the immediate term, we've seen Donald Trump act in ways that the courts have deemed illegal. And the response from J.D. Vance, who is the actual vice president, has been ignore the courts, let the executive get on with its job. What happens now?

I mean, that is stasis. What does the court do next? Right.

Can I just say I absolutely loved, Emily, that you added the word actual to J.D. Vance's title of vice president. I wonder if he should have that added to his business card after Elon Musk's performance yesterday.

It's on the posters, yeah. Right.

So J.D. Vance advanced a proposition that was rejected by the United States Supreme Court more than 200 years ago. In fact, the United States Supreme Court very strongly stated in a case called Marbury versus Madison that it's the courts that determine what the law is. J.D. Vance's position is, no, it's not. It's the president of the United States. Now, the one thing we know about the United States Supreme Court is that this majority on the United States Supreme Court is pretty power hungry. They have been engaged in an ongoing power grab from Congress, from the executive, from others in our society over the course of Chief Justice Roberts' term as the chief justice, the leader of our judiciary.

"I don't think they agree with actual Vice President J.D. Vance. I think they think that they will decide what the law is. And a number of courts have already told the president of the United States that he is breaking the law. And he said in that Elon Musk press conference yesterday when he was able to get a word in edgewise, President Trump said that he is going to abide by the law. He will appeal, which means he will follow the process that's required in the U.S. courts, but that he will abide by those decisions. And I think that is very likely the case. He thinks he can win. And by win, I mean dramatically expand executive power, his own power as president by following the ordinary process. I think he thinks the Supreme Court is going to agree with him that he has a lot of power, particularly as against Congress, not as against the court. They're not going to agree to that."

"So one of the interesting things and a lot of Democrats have got very heated and exercised by this kind of extension of executive authority, the unitary executive theory as kind of, you know, the Trump Trump land likes to talk about it. But Joe Biden, when he was president, he tried to get debt forgiveness. Courts overturned it. And Joe Biden carried on with it, kind of just found a way around the courts and didn't obey the courts. Donald Trump is not the first to try to have his cake and eat it."

"Well, let me just say, I think that's exactly right. To say that powerful people want to accumulate more power is to say the sun rises in the east. I don't think we should be the least bit surprised by that. What President Biden did was not to challenge the power of the courts or to seize power from any other branch of government. A judicial opinion was laid down by the United States Supreme Court. It was in it was a wrong decision, but they issued this decision and his lawyers, President Biden's lawyers, who were outstanding lawyers. I worked with him very closely, read that decision very closely, and they found the loopholes. They found the pathways around it. That is an ordinary operation of American law."

"And let me also, if you don't mind my being a little audacious here, British law. You know, there there are very few absolutes. He dared to say British law. I'm sorry. I almost said British Constitution. And I know that that would cause your people to bang their heads against their steering wheels. But, you know, that is a typical operation of law, is that you try to find the pathway forward that the courts leave open. There are very few absolute statements in the law other than the one I just made."

"And so the president, President Biden, was doing something quite different from what President Trump is doing. President Trump is trying to break the boundaries of his relationships with Congress, with states, with foreign governments. He's essentially said that he is going to seize control of Gaza, ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians who are there and build a huge Trump resort on the beach. Now, there is no law that justifies his doing that, that validates his doing that, authorizes it. In fact, he will violate a long list of laws if he tries to do that. But he is testing the boundaries of his ability to establish an autocracy in the United States. And, you know, we'll see whether or not the courts and the international community are going to allow that to happen."

"Yeah, the testing the boundaries thing is really important, isn't it? Just to remind ourselves that he probably doesn't expect to get everything, but he wants to shift the guardrails. Is that how you'd see, for example, his moves to end the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, essentially making bribery fashionable again? Yes, we're making bribery great again in the United States and all around the world because the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act obviously applies to bribing foreign officials."

Donald Trump, to the extent that he has a philosophy, believes very firmly that powerful, wealthy corporations and powerful, wealthy individuals should be permitted to do that which they need to do because profit is king. And the fact that they have to bribe an official in order to do that, in some cases, is not, in his view, should not be a barrier in any meaningful way. What do you think that will do to business in America now? I mean, just the legitimizing of that. Will it change the minds of ethical business leaders? No, I don't think it will change the minds of ethical business leaders.

Most corporate entities in the United States, and I think that this is true in a lot of Western democracies and probably in a lot of countries that are not Western democracies as well, corporate leaders comply with the law because it is the law. They don't see it as a suggestion. They see it as a mandate. And so they're trying to bring their enterprises into compliance with the law. Now, having said that, they don't always do that. Sometimes they make a business decision in order to violate the law. But I think as a general matter, these corporate enterprises that are doing business overseas, outside the United States, are going to continue to comply with the law because Donald Trump is only going to be president for another slightly under four years. And then some other president may well come in who runs on a platform of ending corruption.

And let me just say the American people may engage in corruption every now and then, but they don't much like it in the public and they don't like when wealthy corporations do it in particular. So let me ask you this, because the thing that strikes me most about America in 2025 compared to America in 2017, and I was living in Washington then, is that then when Donald Trump was trying to do things that pushed at the boundaries, Congress would get up in arms about it. The media would get up in arms about it. Corporate America would get up in arms about it.

This time round, it feels, and maybe I've got this wrong, that the only place where there is resistance to Donald Trump is the courts. And corporate America is waving a white flag. The Democrats seem to be in disarray over what to do. And the media is a rather more fearful set of organizations than it was then. Well, I think you're giving too much credit to corporate America to suggest that they were part of the resistance in 2017. They were as pliant and obsequious in 2017 as they are today. It may be just that some of the boldfaced names like Mark Zuckerberg were not quite as prominent.

But you are right that we are not seeing protests in the streets this time. But we are seeing very aggressive resistance in some parts of the media and absolutely from America's unions. America's labor movement is leading the fight against Trump in the courts, in the streets, in their organizing. They are now the principal resistance.

Democrats in Congress, I think, are still trying to figure out what levers they can use in order to intervene to stop Trump. And there's going to be a very, very important deadline coming up in March when funding for the United States government runs out. And Congress will have to pass new legislation that pays for the federal government. Let me just say it is a crime to spend money if the Congress has not appropriated it. So after March, they're going to have to shut the government down if Congress does not pass another funding bill.

That gives Democrats in Congress, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives, an immense amount of power. Because the House Republicans who control that body have an extraordinarily paper-thin majority, a uniquely thin majority. And when they had a bigger majority, they were unable to govern. They had to keep turning to the Democrats for votes. There's also a thin majority, although not quite as thin, in the United States Senate.

And there are some responsible Republicans in the Senate who I think will agree with the Democrats on spending issues. So that, I think, will be a big test for Democrats in March. They will have to stand up to Trump. And it'll be interesting to see what they're able to squeeze out of the administration and the Republican majority in order to defend the American people, to focus the government on the issues. The American people really care about. And certainly to defend working people.

Seth Harris, thank you so much for joining us. We really enjoyed our chat.

The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel.

We're going back to plastic straws. These things don't work. I've had them many times. And on occasion, they break. They explode. If something's hot, they don't last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It's a ridiculous situation. So we're going back to plastic straws. I think it's OK. I don't think that plastic is going to affect a shark very much as they're eating, as they're munching their way through the ocean. Thank you.

In the formal ceremonial gold oval office, we see Donald Trump signing an executive order ending what he calls onto social the ridiculous Biden push for paper straws, which don't work back to plastic. And four days ago, Elon Musk just tweeted above that greatest president ever. If you want to sum up how 2025 is going in one tweet, that's probably it.

We've gone on this podcast from the theories of unitary executive authority, foreign and corrupt practices act. And now from paper to plastic straws. We're back to plastic. We're back to plastic. We'll see you next week. Bye bye. Bye.

This has been a Global Player original podcast. Transcribed by https://otter.ai.