What Kind of a Populist Is Elon Musk?

Can the world's richest man be a populist?

Elon Musk has plenty of enemies on the left who say the Tesla CEO is too rich to be a champion of working Americans.

He has opponents on the right who say the same, notably Steve Bannon, the mastermind of the 2016 Trump campaign's anti-establishment messaging.

There's rumbling about a clash between the "tech right" and populist right in conservative as well as liberal media.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who was supposed to be Musk's partner in heading the Department of Government Efficiency, fell from grace with MAGA activists after he criticized Americans' work ethic and defended the H1B visa program.

DOGE aims to drastically cut the size of government, by as much as $2 trillion in Musk's most optimistic scenario.

Yet there are some conservatives who join progressives in insisting that slashing spending is what libertarians do, not populists.

President Donald Trump has taken the GOP a long way toward becoming a working-class party.

Is Musk undoing that -- turning the clock back to the days of Ronald Reagan?

If he is, Musk is really advancing populism, not betraying it.

Reagan wasn't just elected by Wall Street, whatever Democrats may think.

Blue-collar voters were the backbone of his electoral coalition, including working-class Americans who had voted Democratic for decades.

Reagan didn't win them over with promises of greater government benefits -- he did it by attacking a government that was bloated and burdensome to the ordinary taxpayer.

Trump voters, like Reagan voters, want less of a government that works against them.

Steve Bannon himself traces the origins of the Trump movement to the Tea Party revolt against government bailouts of financial institutions and other corporations "too big to fail" during the Great Recession.

The programs and agencies Musk is dismantling prop up an elite ecosystem in Washington that takes billions of dollars from taxpayers' pockets.

Take the foreign-aid agency USAID: According to its own reporting, last year only 12.1% of its spending went directly to providing aid in foreign countries.

The other nearly 88% of its budget went to "non-government organizations" in America that serve as conduits for the aid -- and take a cut of the money.

Unlock Aid, an organization calling for reform of foreign-aid programs, estimates "nearly nine out of every ten dollars that USAID spent" in 2022 "went to its international contracting partners, most of which are based in or around the Washington, DC area."

Four of the six counties in the United States with the highest household income -- including the one with the highest of all, Loudoun County, Virginia -- are in the D.C. region.

The nation's capital grows rich from the money its networks extract from taxpayers.

NGOs receiving USAID money do not, of course, keep it all for themselves -- only a slice.

But when tens of billions of dollars are flowing through the system every year, even a taste is a feast.

Not coincidentally, Washington, D.C. and its suburbs are deep blue on the electoral map, which helps keep Maryland and Virginia in the Democratic column in presidential contests.

And a certain portion of the aid money that stays with American NGOs, in the form of employees' salaries, gets passed on to the Democratic Party and progressive causes in the form of campaign contributions and other political donations.

That's what makes the system so hard to fight from within.

Republican officeholders are easily tempted into thinking they could run the machine for their own advantage, and indeed, there are plenty of NGOs in Washington that function as professional retirement homes for influential Republicans who have played the game.

The only way to get rid of the corruption is to bring in outsiders who can't be enticed by what Washington can offer.

Trump himself is one such outsider, and Musk is another.

Populism isn't about rejecting wealthy individuals like Trump or Musk, whose personal fortunes pale beside the kind of money government spends.

The point of populism is to curtail the self-dealing of an insider class that feeds off everyone's taxes.

Smaller government means government more focused on the limited number of things that are truly in the public's interest.

When DOGE cuts waste, fraud, abuse and self-dealing, it frees up funds that can go to better uses.

And when government doesn't take such a big bite out of American's paychecks in the first place, they have more money to spend taking care of their families and communities -- and to give to the international charities that they decide are best suited to help the needy abroad.

Not a cent that Musk and his team cuts disappears from circulation.

Instead the money is taken away from the elite and given back to uses the people approve of -- or it goes back to the people themselves, to be used the way they think best.

That's populism, and yes, Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, is a populist.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 02/03/25: Can Trump Win Trade Wars Before They Start?
• 01/21/25: Trump Inaugurates a New Era
• 01/14/25: Dems Aren't Democracy's Party
• 01/07/25: Donald Trump's Worldwide Election
• 12/31/24: Harmless self-deception?
• 12/17/24: Communism thriving, including HERE
• 12/10/24: Birthright Citizenship Is a Breach in the Border
• 12/03/24: Identity Politics, Not Biden, Cost Dems the Election
• 11/19/24: Why Dems Are Losing Tomorrow's Elections Today
• 11/12/24: Dems Are at a Dead End, Unless They Learn From Trump
• 10/29/24: Harris Targets Married Women
• 10/22/24: Vibes Turn Bad for Kamala Harris
• 10/15/24: Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump
• 10/08/24: How Donald Trump Can Win the Popular Vote
• 10/01/24: Iran Targets America's Elections -- and Trump
• 09/24/24: Trump's Would-Be Assassin's Explanation
• 09/17/24: When Character Assassination Becomes the Real Thing
• 09/10/24: Kamala Harris Runs Like a Republican -- and Misleads
• 09/04/24: Where Trump Is Moderate -- While Kam Is Maximalist
• 08/27/24: Donald Trump Is Reagan's Heir
• 08/20/24: Will Voters Settle for Joe Biden's Wing(wo)man?
• 08/13/24: Trump Has to Run Like It's 2016 Again
• 08/07/24: Is Trump Running Against Harris -- or Donald Trump?
• 07/30/24: Kamala Harris' 'Mean Girls' Election
• 07/23/24: Kamala Harris Is the Opponent Donald Trump Wants
• 07/16/24: Ready for Biden's Counterattack?
• 07/09/24: Biden Faces Richard Nixon's Choice
• 07/02/24: Should Biden Drop Out -- or Resign?
• 06/18/24: Separate Sexual Identity and State
• 06/18/24: Nigel Farage Makes the Trump Moment Permanent
• 06/04/24: State that's long eluded GOP turns toward Trump
• 05/21/24: Trump's Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
• 05/14/24: What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
• 05/07/24: The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden's Party
• 05/06/24: Nationalists of the World, Unite?
• 04/25/24: Foreign Policy Splits
• 04/16/24: How pro-lifers stand to lose everything gained in overturning Roe
• 04/02/24: PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.
• 04/02/24: Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
• 03/26/24: Trump Hunts for a VP Close to Home
• 03/19/24: Princess Kate and Democracy's Discontents
• 03/12/24: Can Biden Buy the Voters?
• 03/05/24: Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
• 02/20/24: Do Americans Trust Either Party?
• 02/13/24: Vladimir Putin -- A Passive Aggressor
• 01/23/24: Will 'Lawfare' Take Trump Off the Ballot?
• 01/16/24: Will Africa Save America?
• 01/09/24:'The Sopranos' at 25: A new world tragedy
• 01/02/24: Trump, Biden and a Fight for the Heart
• 12/12/23: What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
• 12/12/23: Biden Looks Doomed -- But Is He?
• 12/05/23: A Test for Trump and His Rivals
• 11/21/23: When Inequality Is Fatal for Men
• 11/14/23: Nevermind, The Battle's Over
• 11/07/23: War in the Dem Party -- and at the Opera
• 10/24/23: Israel's Lesson for 2024: A Lib Crackup
• 10/17/23: Libs' Dilemma: Immigration or Israel?
• 10/10/23: Why Bidenflation Defines Bidenomics
• 10/03/23: Will Gavin Newsom Copy Trump?
• 09/26/23: Biden's a Loser -- but Dems Can't Ditch Him
• 09/19/23: Do Sex Scandals Matter?
• 09/12/23: Cornel West Spells Doom for Biden
• 09/05/23: What Trump Does for Democracy
• 08/2/23: Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
• 08/22/23: Take 'Rich Men North of Richmond' Seriously
• 08/16/23: How America Kills Its Own
• 08/08/23: The Biden Pardon That Can Spare America
• 08/01/23: Harding, a consevative for the ages
• 07/25/23: Demography Destiny, for Us and China
• 07/18/23: The Frontrunner Who Looks Like a Loser Is Biden
• 07/11/23: Britain's Bad Example for American Conservatives
• 07/05/23: Could We Still Win a Revolutionary War?
• 06/27/23: Civilizations Clash -- in Ukraine and at Home
• 06/20/23: China Comes for the Caribbean
• 06/13/23: Fertility, Family and Bio-Socialism
• 06/06/23: From American Dream to Orwell's Nightmare
• 05/23/23: Ukraine war is an existential struggle --- for the West
• 05/23/23: Learn the Right Midterm Lessons -- or Lose in 2024
• 05/16/23: Feinstein Today Is Biden Tomorrow
• 05/09/23: Trump, DeSantis and Political Courtship
• 05/02/23: RFK Jr.'s Threat to Biden
• 04/25/23: Biden's Lost Generation
• 04/25/23: Who's In Charge of Clarence Thomas?
• 04/11/23: Beyond AI, Our Cyborg Future
• 04/04/23: 2024: 3 Leaders, 1 Way to Win
• 03/28/23: Climate Science Makes a Bad Religion
• 03/21/23: All the Conspiracy That's Fit to Print