By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Democrats have finally found someone they hate more than Donald Trump. Elon Musk, who is currently running roughshod over the federal bureaucracy with a sleep-deprived team of brilliant young tech geeks, is the public enemy of the hour.
After a devastating election loss and three weeks into a whirlwind Trump administration, what most animates a leaderless Democratic Party is their collective shock and horror occasioned by Elon Musk and his handiwork.
If Trump Derangement Syndrome has abated somewhat, Musk Derangement Syndrome has arisen to fill the vacuum. Democrats are braying for Musk to get arrested at rallies in the street. They’re trying to subpoena him. They want to know if his DOGE team is guilty of breaches of national security.
They are targeting him with a bill they’ve dubbed, embarrassingly, the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy (ELON MUSK) Act.
The greatest entrepreneur of our time is bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to the task of pruning and rationalizing federal agencies, a job that Democrats long assumed was so gargantuan and complex that no one would ever dare seriously attempt it, let alone accomplish it.
The German leftist Rudi Dutschke is associated with the idea of “the long march through the institutions,” or a slow takeover of society by co-opting political and cultural centers of power. In Washington, Musk is attempting a very short march through the institutions — trying to reorient the federal bureaucracy and ax waste long targeted by Republicans in a matter of weeks.
In the first Trump administration, Trump adviser Peter Navarro boasted of doing things on “Trump time,” or faster than anyone would have thought possible absent the impatient proddings of his boss. “Musk time” is more rapid still.
A common charge against Musk is that he’s unelected. “Nobody Voted for Elon Musk,” the progressive publication Mother Jones huffed. Well, yes, but no one voted for any other Trump adviser, either. The president is elected to run the executive branch and then relies on myriad people in different positions with varying degrees of power and influence — none of whom are elected — to do it.
There is a long history of presidents tapping informal advisers to assist them. The originally derisive term, “kitchen cabinet,” dates back to Andrew Jackson in the 1830s.
It is also rich to complain about Elon Musk’s unelected status when no one in the vast federal apparatus that he’s grappling with was elected, either. The difference is that Musk is operating with the approval of a newly elected president.
Of course, the legalities matter. Musk is a so-called special government employee, which makes him more than just a billionaire who’s walked in off the streets, but his powers are limited. As long as federal officers are acting on his advice rather than Musk issuing orders directly, his influence should pass legal muster.
In general, Musk’s DOGE would be well-advised to take account of potential legal obstacles and “move less quickly than it might like and break things,” rather than “move fast and break things” and get blocked by the courts. One way or the other, though, the Trump administration’s vision of executive power is on a collision course with the congressional spending power that will inevitably create politically fraught, highly consequential litigation.
As for the Democrats’ campaign against Musk, they may well succeed in making him a hate figure. If the Democrats take the House, presumably their first act will be to launch an investigation of Musk and issue a 1,000-page report with an hour-by-hour account of the moves of every 23-year-old working for him on DOGE. But, by then, Musk already may have made meaningful changes to how the federal government works and be on to his next project — say, mining meteorites or making cold fusion practical.
In the meantime, becoming such an enormous lightning rod that he diverts some of the political heat from Trump himself is another one of Elon Musk’s seemingly impossible achievements.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.