US President Donald Trump has rejected the idea that he has “handed over the presidency” to a billionaire. Elon Muskwho played an outsized role in the president-elect’s transition to the White House.
Trump made the comments during a speech in Arizona on Sunday, days after the owner of Tesla and SpaceX stood alongside the president-elect to scuttling a budget bill negotiated in Congress.
The incident is the latest in which Musk has played an atypical role in the new Trump administration, drawing criticism from Democrats and Trump’s own Republican Party.
Responding directly to these criticisms for the first time, Trump congratulated Musk, before adding: “And no, he will not take the presidency. »
Trump further called the suggestion that he “handed the presidency to Elon Musk” a “hoax” pushed by his political opponents.
In a later quip, Trump stressed that there was no risk of Musk officially becoming president because the Constitution would have prohibited him from doing so.
“You know why it can’t be [president]’” Trump asked the crowd in Arizona. “He was not born in this country.”
South African-born Musk – the world’s richest person according to Forbes magazine – has become one of Trump’s biggest supporters in the run-up to the election, backing the president-elect in July following a attempted assassination and injecting approximately $200 million into an investment project. Political action committee (PAC) supporting Trump.
Trump has since tapped him to lead a proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with taking an approach to cutting federal government spending.
The so-called “ministry” has been presented as an independent advisory committee, not a formal government agency, and its jurisdiction remains undefined.
Intervention on a budget agreement
Trump’s comments come a day after outgoing US President Joe Biden signed a law on financing this avoids a government shutdown.
The previous bill negotiated by members of both parties in Congress was torpedoed days earlier when Trump spoke in opposition.
The president-elect’s main argument was that the bill did not raise the debt ceiling — a political fight Trump hoped to avoid before taking office in January. The debt ceiling is the United States borrowing limit, a cap imposed by Congress on the amount the government can borrow to close the gap between its revenues and expenditures.
Musk had also spoken out against the deal, which he criticized in a flurry of tweets on the X social media platform that he also owns. He pledged financial support for key challenges from lawmakers who supported the original legislation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson later told US media that he spoke by phone with Trump and Musk as a new bill was being renegotiated.
The final bill – which funds the US government at the current rate through March 14 – gutted several provisions that Trump and Musk opposed. However, the final version did not raise the debt ceiling, despite opposition from a number of Republican lawmakers.
Speaking to CNN, Republican lawmaker Rich McCormick said Musk’s intervention showed “he has influence and he will put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks is right something for him.”
Other Republicans have been more tolerant, with Rep. Tony Gonzales saying in a CBS interview that he “feels like Elon Musk is our prime minister.”
Speaking on CNN, Senator Bill Hagerty praised Musk’s role in negotiating the bill, while pushing back on the idea that the billionaire was behind Trump’s decisions.
“Extremely alarming”
Beyond the budget agreement, Musk regular presence alongside Trump before he took office on January 20 has sparked concern among Democrats for weeks.
The billionaire was on the phone when Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his election victory. He was also present at recent meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in New York.
Criticism was sparked by memes on social media showing Trump kowtowing to Musk in various contexts.
Following last week’s budget negotiations, several Democrats accused Musk of intervening to serve his own interests.
They highlighted his support for removing a provision from the original bill that could have limited his companies’ operations in China.
“It is extremely alarming that House Republican leaders, at the behest of an unelected billionaire, abandoned a bipartisan, bicameral funding deal that included this critical provision to protect critical American jobs and capabilities,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. Friday.
