Opinion | Mike Johnson’s shutdown conversation with Elon Musk has an ominous historical parallel

One Sunday in March 1888, former President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary, “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.” Hayes offered this private admission at the peak of the Gilded Age, when, as the historian Richard White put it, “corruption suffused government and the economy.” Businessmen amassed fortunes never seen before in American history and demanded government officials aid them in expanding those fortunes further.

If there was any doubt that we are in a new Gilded Age, Speaker Mike Johnson’s admission to Fox News Wednesday obliterated it.

Johnson appeared on “Fox and Friends” the morning after congressional leaders released the full text of a deal to keep the federal government running through mid-March. As my colleague Hayes Brown explained Tuesday, Congress needs to pass a funding bill this week to avoid “a decidedly unmerry shutdown.” On the one hand, most House Republicans don’t want to vote for a bill that Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden will accept. But they also don’t want to be blamed for a government shutdown. To square this circle, Johnson planned to count on Democratic votes to expedite the bill’s passage with a two-thirds majority, so much of his caucus can oppose the deal without consequence.

After playing a compilation of GOP representatives complaining about the bill, “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy asked Speaker Johnson about Elon Musk’s post a few hours prior that “this bill should not pass.” 

“If you could,” Doocy asked, “what’s your message to Elon Musk?”

“I was communicating with Elon last night,” Johnson revealed. “Elon, Vivek [Ramaswamy] and I were on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this.”

In other words, with the federal government days from a partial shutdown, the person second in the line of presidential succession is spending his time tending to the egos of two rich businessmen.

Johnson was not even consulting Musk and Ramaswamy on areas where they might have expertise. He was explaining to these men very basic facts about how the House of Representative works. “Remember, guys, we still have just a razor-thin margin of Republicans,” Johnson says he told the two men. “So any bill has to have Democrat votes.”

The speaker’s attempts at reassurance were unsuccessful. Like Musk, Ramaswamy has maintained his opposition despite Johnson’s efforts. Nor, it seems, was Musk paying attention to the lesson in congressional basics: He wrote on X that any congressperson or senator “who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Never mind that only one-third of the Senate is up for re-election in 2026.

The problem here goes far deeper than the rich mistaking wealth for expertise — any sports fan, for example, can name a dozen team owners who demonstrate that failing to the world every year. These two men, though, have been granted an advisory commission on government spending. Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut trillions from the federal budget — reductions as vast as their grasp on governance is tenuous. And that’s before you include Musk’s web of conflicts of interest with various government regulators. In a vacuum, their posts would be harmless, but their influence makes them disastrous.

Late Wednesday, Musk’s influence was affirmed when President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance released a statement echoing him. They lambasted congressional Republicans for “allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025” and calling for “a streamlined spending bill” that increases the debt ceiling but “doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want,” such as “sweetheart provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney.” Will Musk and Ramaswamy be the architects of this “streamlined” bill?

For decades, the influence of money in politics has grown alongside the country’s increasing income inequality. Those who warned about this growing influence have been thoroughly vindicated. This year, Trump’s campaign was fueled by roughly $800 million from seven billionaire families. His administration will include more than a dozen billionaires, the wealthiest since President Warren Harding’s corrupt White House.

To end the first Gilded Age, Hayes realized, massive reforms were needed. “The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital,” he wrote. “Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change.”

Ending the second Gilded Age will require the same sort of sweeping remedies.