Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, Dec. 20, 2024

Jeffrey Goldberg: Joe Biden is still president, but you wouldn't really know it. Elon Musk and his partner, the president-elect, Donald Trump, are making it clear that they are already in charge. Musk, the world's richest man, is also the most powerful man in Washington right now. We'll explain how this came to be, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Everyone's favorite subject, government shutdown, is on the table this week, as is the role of Elon Musk in the coming administration. Also in the news this week, Donald Trump's desire to prosecute Liz Cheney for investigating Donald Trump.

Joining me to discuss all of this, Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast, Mark Leibovich is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, Ashley Parker is a senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post, and Vivian Salama is a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Thank you all for being here.

The topic is Elon Musk. I want you all to watch a clip from Rosa DeLauro, the Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut, which will give you a sense of what people are saying on the Hill and off this week about this new Mar-a-Lago dynamic.

Rep. Rosa Delauro (D-CT): The Democrats are in the minority in this body. When you have the pen, which is what the Republicans have, they write the bill. They write the bill. They post the bill. They agreed on a bill.

And you know what? They got scared, because President Musk told them, President Musk said, don't do it. Don't do it. Shut the government down.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Asma, how did Elon Musk become seemingly the most powerful man in Washington?

Asma Khalid, White House Correspondent, NPR: It's an excellent question, especially for a man who historically had not been heavily involved in American politics. But the brief story is that, this summer, he became the wealthiest political donor that we have in the 2024 election cycle. He invested, I believe it's over $270 million, talking about a quarter of a billion dollars in this race, to help Donald Trump and Republicans get elected.

Fast forward, Trump wins, he is appointed as an adviser to the president-elect, so he's in this unofficial position, but he's on, you know, phone calls with world leaders. He's there advising the president. You see image after image, photo after photo that's taken, Musk is sort of just behind Trump in all these pictures.

And what we saw happen this week is that Musk put out a series of tweets blasting this short-term spending bill, and you saw a whole bunch of Republicans line up and say that, no, they're no longer going to support the bill.

But, look, I will say, I think what is extremely unusual about Musk is it's not just money that he has. He has ownership of a major social media platform, X, which he owns, and he's able to utilize that and he has hundreds of millions of followers there.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mark, you're the premier anthropologist of Washington morays.

Mark Leibovich, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Folkways, I prefer.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Morays and folkways. Have you ever seen anything like this, a figure like Musk play such a determining role in, by the way, an administration that hasn't even started yet, noting?

Mark Leibovich: Right. Yes, no, not at all. And I think what's interesting about Musk is, one, he's a new character that's been introduced into the sitcom. And I think like the whole trope of a sitcom, a Washington presidency as a T.V. show is obviously probably overdone, and it's also -- it's diminishing of the seriousness that we're dealing with.

But Elon Musk is a new character. Donald Trump loves new toys. He loves new partners and he especially loves to be seen in partnership with someone who is richer than him, who is richer than anyone in the world, and he's unpredictable. And I think to some degree, he's part of the drama in which everyone sort of analyzes the relationship. I think people like Rosa DeLauro and Democrats think that they can make great shame of Donald Trump by calling him, you know, Vice President Trump to Elon Musk being the president.

But, ultimately, I think he's something that will probably wear thin at a certain point and we're all sort of watching --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, that's the question, Ashley, I wanted to ask is, you know, everybody has a half life, radioactive half life with Donald Trump. Every relationship has a half life. When and obviously people like Rosa DeLauro, Adam Kinzinger, others on social media and off are sort of playing up this, oh, he's the real president, as a way of like needling the actual president-elect. Is this a stable relationship, turning to you is like the relationship columnist on our panel today? Is this --

Ashley Parker, Senior National Political Correspondent, The Washington Post: Is it because I'm a woman?

Jeffrey Goldberg: No, because, you're a cute observer of human interactions. But, I mean, how long does something like this last?

Ashley Parker: I mean, I was just asking someone in Trump World this, and they said that's the $64,000 question, but I think the answer is twofold. On the one hand, these trolls, right, the way people get crosswise with Trump is when they begin to eclipse him, right? The death knell -- the beginning of the death knell for Steve Bannon was when he appeared on the cover of Time. That's a magazine that only Trump should grace, right? And that kind of begins the dissent.

The flip side is that, as Mark said, Elon Musk has something that Trump doesn't, which he is incredibly wealthy. He is much more wealthy than Trump. And what Trump does not like is when he believes that people are profiting off of him, right, that they only got a deal because of their proximity to him or because the way he set them up in his administration.

And what Trump recognizes correctly is that with or without Donald Trump, whether or not he's sitting on the patio of Mar-a-Lago or not, Elon Musk will still be Elon Musk. He will still have his billions of dollars. He will still have his social media platform. He will still have all his other very successful companies. And that I think is the thing. There is a half life, but I think that is the dynamic that potentially extends that relationship much longer than you might otherwise expect.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, let me ask this of both of you and Vivian. Who needs who more in this relationship? Does Donald Trump need Elon Musk more than Elon Musk needs Donald Trump? You choose it out, who goes first?

Vivian Salama, National Politics Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: Honestly, it's hard to say. I mean, Elon Musk is an outside -- you know, we have to remember that even though he will be playing a role in the future Trump administration, he's actually on the outside. He's already a self-made billionaire. He has a lot there that he doesn't have a lot to lose at this point. And so I don't think that he necessarily needs Trump. Whether or not Trump needs him, that's also debatable. I mean, Trump has his base, his following.

Jeffrey Goldberg: That $270 billion that Osmo was referring to is -- million --

Vivian Salama: I mean that --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Billion, which, by the way, Elon Musk has billion. He's worth $400 billion.

Ashley Parker: Yes.

Vivian Salama: That certainly didn't hurt. That certainly didn't hurt.

Ashley Parker: Yes. I mean, I think Elon, in certain ways, needs Trump more in the sense that Trump gives him this agency, DOGE, right? Trump gives him entree to government when he's not an elected official, doesn't really know the federal bureaucracy.

The flip side is I think when Donald Trump tires of Elon and chooses to crush him, like he has the loyalty of the MAGA base, Trump can successfully banish Elon. But the difference is when Elon is banished, he goes back to being Elon, unlike some of those other people like a Rex Tillerson or someone else who ends up banished and a bit diminished.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. No, I find it hard to believe that the relationship ends well, in part because many of Trump's relationship don't end well.

But staying on the subject of what Elon wants, obviously, as important as Tesla is to him and Starlink, his space business is hugely important. And so I'm just wondering, based on reporting, based on informed speculation, Mark, is there a long-term play here for Elon Musk to basically become the space czar of America? Is that what's going on here? I'm just trying to figure it out.

Mark Leibovich: Yes. I don't -- I mean, I think he could be the space czar for America now, if he wants to be. I do think -- I mean, the other piece of what I think --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Maybe he is the space czar.

Mark Leibovich: Maybe he is the space czar. We haven't even known that. We're just holding up the announcement for the appropriate time.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Mark Leibovich: I mean, he does have all these government contracts. That's the other part of this. I mean, he controls huge aspects of the government, and the government funds a lot of him. But I don't -- I mean, it's hard to think of someone who is worth that much money relying on a government contract for livelihood in any way.

Look I think these are not -- my sense is these are mercurial folks who are not thinking long-term. They are just sort of having fun at this moment. And I don't think anyone --

Ashley Parker: As one does.

Mark Leibovich: As one does with the presidency. But, look, I mean, I don't think anyone seriously thinks that this is going to be the dynamic in play in two years.

Asma Khalid: But even if it's not the dynamic in play in two years, I just do think if you like sit here for a moment and look at it, this is like an astounding thing to see someone who is the wealthiest man in the world, never elected into any position in government, but has a major platform and can ostensibly kill a piece of legislation in a day, or help kill a piece of legislation.

Vivian Salama: Yes. I mean, and this is one of the factors that I think has made people around Trump very uneasy in the last couple of days. Because one of the remarkable things about his campaign this time around was its discipline. The fact that they were able to kind of control the messaging, keep Trump on message to a certain degree and also control the people who kind of got to him.

And suddenly in the last 48 hours, we have seen two bills actually implode in a GOP-led House by Elon Musk, essentially --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Because of a tweet.

Vivian Salama: Because of a tweet. Actually, 92 tweets in the course of a 24-hour period. And Trump was silent for about 12 of those hours when Elon Musk first began.

And so there're so many questions about what was going on behind the scenes. Why was Elon given carte blanche to go out there and say those things?

Ashley Parker: I mean, the thing about Trump, and this was true in the first term, is that this dynamic has always existed, right? Everyone wanted to be the last person in the room because they would often persuade him. And I remember at one moment, right near the end of his first term, he's considering pardons. He's on Air Force One with a group of reporters, and he asks us, is there anyone you need pardons?

And you sort of got the sense that if you had an uncle, right, in whose name you're like, yes, sir, this man was, you know, wrongly imprisoned, he would have done it. And that has been a challenge throughout the administration.

I remember another person saying it's one thing people love and hate about him. He's very populist. If someone is in there who has no foreign and policy experience but they're in the oval for a foreign policy debate, he will turn to them, he will ask their opinion and he may weigh it just as substantively as he will the opinion of his general.

And so Elon is just, as Mark said, the latest character and sort of outsize because of his presence, because of his platform, because of his money. But this is a very familiar dynamic for anyone who has studied or covered Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I want to note for the record that we're going to spend the last ten minutes of the show pardoning people. Also at the end of the year, I'm just feeling that --

Ashley Parker: We'll just go around.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I'm feeling that. I'm feeling that mood. I'm feeling that mood. Anybody you guys have just, let us know.

I want to note that something else that Musk tweeted yesterday was an endorsement of a far right German political party. Only the AFD can save Germany, he said. And the AFD is -- this is Germany we're talking about. This is a party that is not dissimilar in some ways from more antique fascist parties of Germany. And it's so far to the right that other far right European parties try to stay away from them.

I'm wondering what -- this is a very serious subject -- what that means for the global dynamic. If Elon Musk is sitting right next to Donald Trump and telling him how great this extremist German party is, what does that hold once -- what does that hold for us once Trump actually assumes office?

Asma Khalid: I think there's a lot of unknowns about what it'll mean for once Trump, you know, actually takes power. But I think at this point, you look at Elon Musk, he is one of the people who, at this moment in time, seems to have the ear of the president-elect in a very unique way, right, on calls with foreign leaders. That's not something that traditionally somebody who doesn't have the expertise of governance normally does.

And, look, whether or not he falls out of vogue or out of fashion with Donald Trump, I do think there's this moment to sit and wonder like what does this mean for the health of the American democracy, as it's known. Because we look around at other countries, right? We're talking about this earlier, like people will say, oh, Russia has oligarchs, Russian oligarchs. And we think that in our country it's somehow unique or that sort of it doesn't have the same system. And I think there's a moment to sort of sit around and say, well, this is actually extremely unprecedented to this degree, to see somebody who is so wealthy in an unelected position have the ear of the president in such a way.

Vivian Salama: It's also not surprising to see people in Trump's orbit embracing some of these right wing governments. You saw Trump himself has supported Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who's right wing. He has supported Le Pen in France, who's a right wing politician. He has invited Argentina's populist president to come and attend the inauguration and he has said, okay. So, I mean, these are people that he has traditionally embraced. And so Elon Musk is kind of taking a page from that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: To be fair though, that AFD makes the president of Argentina look like Elizabeth Warren. You know, I mean, these are some serious extremists.

Vivian Salama: Absolutely. And I have to tell you, you know, I sent the tweet, Elon's tweet, to a top German official to ask, you know, what their take is. And I got sort of a shrug emoji back because they are trying to make sense of it themselves. Yes, they themselves are trying to make sense of it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: No, it's all -- I mean, it's just worth noting for the record that the most influential private adviser to the president-elect of the United States is endorsing a German fascist party, noting for the record for future discussion.

Vivian, I want to turn to you because there's another friend of Donald Trump, who has been active, according to your own reporting, Tucker Carlson, another private adviser. You had a pretty big scoop about his ability to quash nominations. Could you give us a little bit of what you discovered this week?

Vivian Salama: So, Tucker Carlson, who, for folks at home who have forgotten, the former Fox News host and right wing commentator, is a regular at Mar-a-Lago, speaks to the president-elect pretty regularly and is part of that sphere of influence that we're talking about here with Elon Musk and others, where he has managed to be very influential with the president-elect.

And in this case what I was talking about is the case of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former CIA director as well, who was a shoe-in up until almost Election Day to be secretary of defense, according to a number of people who are close to Trump. But Tucker Carlson, who has long hated him, believes he is, quote, evil, says he's a warmonger, a neo-con, even just a traditional Republican has made the case to Trump that bringing him back into the fray would be a terrible mistake. He also has convinced that Mike Pompeo tried to assassinate Julian Assange, among other accusations.

And so, Trump --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Unfounded accusations, to be clear.

Vivian Salama: Unfounded accusations. And so, you know, Don Jr., Trump's eldest son, also kind of pushed the idea that some of these neo-cons who turned against Trump in the previous administration, you know, a lot of the national security folks who came out later and said he was unfit to be president, they linked Pompeo to that and Trump listened. Mike Pompeo's out.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Ashley, I want to talk about another Republican who's in disfavor with the MAGA forces. This week, the House Republicans issued a report calling for Liz Cheney to be investigated by the FBI, whose future leader could be Kash Patel, a very strong loyalist of Donald Trump, for her role in the investigation of January 6th. So, is this rhetorical excess or is there something more here?

Ashley Parker: Well, again, this to me is one of the open questions, because Trump says and does and threatens a lot of things and he doesn't do all of them. But he does do some of them. And what the Republicans did was sort of served him up on a platter, a road map for potentially going after her, should he choose.

And if you just look at his comments, he's still kind of been all over the place. On the one hand, he sort of said a version of people are saying, right? Like people are saying she really should be looked into. Well, those people are House Republicans and they're doing it because they believe they have gotten wink, wink, nod, nod signals for you to do it. But he's also said he doesn't want to look back to the past. So, it's sort of a Rorschach test for where he is and where we go when he actually becomes president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mark, I want to ask you about Joe Biden, president United States for another few weeks. A lot of coverage in the last week or two about, including The Wall Street Journal, his limitations that were showing themselves, his intellectual limitations or cognitive limitations, the age issues coming out long before this past summer, or the debate on June 27th.

You were warning early about Biden's age. Is there anything surprising coming out to you now or is this kind of a story about a group of people around Joe Biden covering up for him?

Mark Leibovich: I mean, I'm not really surprised. I mean, I'm surprised to the degree to which he has completely disappeared since the election. I mean, I guess it's sort of obvious that a lame duck president by definition will not be a factor, especially when someone who has such a big footprint as Donald Trump is waiting in the wings.

I do think that there's a lot of sort of unfinished reporting done on this, which I think is going to come out around what this White House really did look like. And is that a failing of the media over the last few years? Maybe. But I also think, you know, there was a very serious effort to protect him, and to shelter him, and to keep him away from cameras, and to keep him away from situations where this would be exposed.

And, look, is it a scandal? I don't know if I'd use that word, but I also think it is a massive source of, you know, information that we're still trying to understand.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mark, let me stay with you. I wanted to ask since we're coming to the end of the year, I wanted to ask you all veteran political analysts, as you are, to talk about the things that actually surprised you a bit over this last year.

Mark, let me start with you. What was the -- there's a lot of surprises this year, but what's something that really struck you as, oh, that's unusual?

Mark Leibovich: Yes I mean, I think one of the things that struck me was, I mean, the sort of sprint to the election that the Kamala Harris, you know, Tim Walz campaign ran. I was surprised by -- first of all, I thought Kamala Harris did a nice job. I thought she -- I think Tim Walz was a good -- you know, pretty good candidate. But I was surprised that they sort of landed on the politics of joy, which struck me as one of the most fundamentally sort of bad misreads of a political moment, you know, in a long time, which is, you know, this is not a joyous moment in the American economy, in the American sort of mood in general.

And it was -- it struck me as something that was tone deaf and something that when I heard it, I was thinking, I don't know if this is going to work at all, and I don't know if they've thought this through. And so I guess I would say that my surprise from the last year is the politics of joy being a thing, because it struck me as misguided.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Vivian, what was something that really struck you as unusual, or just you weren't expecting?

Vivian Salama: Well, I told your producers, I don't know if this was too obvious, but Donald Trump getting shot this year was mind blowing for a lot of us who have covered him for years. But not only that, the way that how he narrowly escaped death, I mean, literally by millimeters. And --

Jeffrey Goldberg: A head turn.

Vivian Salama: It was a head turn that saved his life, and it is pretty extraordinary. And we went just from that extraordinary moment to two days later, the Republican National Convention, which took on a completely new mood, catapulted his candidacy, and he was already doing well, Joe Biden was still in the race at that moment, and so his polling was still fairly good and he was in the lead.

But to see the enthusiasm behind his candidacy after that, it was really just an extraordinary moment in American history.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Asma, what about you?

Asma Khalid: Equally perhaps unsurprising, but covering the Biden campaign, which then became the Harris campaign, for me, which the moment that was just so surprising because I genuinely didn't think it was going to happen was when Joe Biden officially dropped out of the race.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Why didn't you think it was going to happen?

Asma Khalid: For a couple of reasons. One is -- I will say, one is that the campaign and the White House was so insistent it was not going to happen. Secondly, I think that the moment in which it happened, I mean, keep in mind this was after he had already debated Trump, after the RNC had taken place, talking about the end of July, it was so late in the season that it just seemed like it was not a recipe for success for the Democratic Party to take place at that moment.

But I also just think there is this sense that Biden has often had, that he was the man, the ultimate man, he said this, he thought this that could save the day and do this job. And he felt he was the best equipped man to do this. I remember I asked him at a presser why he did not stick to his commitment to be a bridge candidate. And he said, essentially, the circumstances had changed.

So, I just felt like there was such an insistence, even after the debate --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Which is what he said about the pardon of his son, also, the circumstances --

Asma Khalid: The circumstances have changed.

So, I just think it was so shocking, the fact that he did it initially by a statement while having COVID, the moment that it happened, the time that it happened, and, frankly, the fact that it even happened,

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, it's so interesting, not as shocking as an assassination attempt, obviously, but the fact that the debate -- if that debate, the first debate, had happened in September or even October, Joe Biden would have had to have been the candidate running against Donald Trump. We'll never know. It's alternate history. But just the scheduling of that debate is actually one of the most important facts in modern American political history.

Asma Khalid: I mean, I remember I had to write -- like you know everyone writes their pre-write stories that all editors make you do. So, I had pre-written a story, and I did one of those. And I remember after the debate, the editors are bugging me on vacation, edit, fix your story, fix your story. And I was like nah, it's not going to happen, and lo and behold it did.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, people -- I think, generally, people should listen to editors, but that's just me.

Ashley, what about you?

Ashley Parker: Since everyone has taken the good ones, I will just go meta and say what was surprising to me was how surprising and exciting this race ended up being. I was sort of the view of the American public that this was kind of going to be a slog. It was the exact same two white guys fighting over more or less the exact same issues. They were just both like four years older. And then for all the reasons they stated, everything just got upended in this wild, wild way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, right. That was -- I mean, I guess the surprise -- was it at all surprising to anyone that Kamala Harris didn't do well or is that baked into this?

Mark Leibovich: Was it a surprise that she did or didn't do well?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Did not do well, like did not win any of the swing states. That would have been one of mine.

Mark Leibovich: Yes, I thought she was going to do better. I mean, I might have drank too much lead up to the election Kool Aid and wasn't smart enough.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You were so joy-filled.

Mark Leibovich: I wasn't. No, I was condemning the politics. Let's get this on the record.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Joyously though? Okay.

Mark Leibovich: No. I mean, look, I just thought I'm actually -- I mean, I was at a lot of her events. I mean, they were very spirited events. There were big crowds and everything. It felt like something was happening.

Vivian Salama: Also in the final days, it felt like there was a tiny bit of momentum for her, especially with women voters. And so they thought maybe she'd get some a bit, do a bit better.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. Well, we -- unfortunately, we do have to leave it there for now. It's a very fascinating conversation. I could go all day, but we can't. So, I want to thank our panelists for being here and for sharing their reporting. And I want to thank our viewers at home for joining us all year.

And from all of us here at Washington Week, we want to wish you the happiest of holidays.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.