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President Donald Trump is now treating his former buddy Elon Musk like an “off the rails” oddity.
But as their relationship continues to devolve with insults and Musk’s promise to fund his own “America Party” instead of Trump’s Republican Party, it’s worth looking at what a well-funded alternative party might actually do.
I talked to John Kenneth White, a professor emeritus of politics at Catholic University and the author of several books on American political parties, why they’re formed and where they’re headed. We talked about what political harm Musk might actually be able to inflict on the president.
Our conversation, edited for length, is below.
Money, negativity and Ross Perot
WOLF: You’ve written books about the history of political parties. What’s the first thing that goes through your head when you hear that Elon Musk is forming one?
WHITE: Several strands, really:
One is that we have a system now where our politics is increasingly top-down, depending on the wealthiest person and the amount of money they have.
If they become dissatisfied, as Musk has clearly become dissatisfied with Trump, then you get this situation where he can say, “All right, not only am I going to withhold my money from Republican candidates, which may be the most significant thing out of the formation of this party, but I’m going to form a new party that will respond to be responsive to my interest, punish a party I previously supported, and, at a minimum, influence the outcome of elections to make sure that Republicans lose.”
A second strand that emerges is — and this has some possibilities, but the obstacles are, I think, greater than going to Mars — but Americans are dissatisfied with both parties.
They’ve been dissatisfied with both parties for a long period of time. Elections have turned into a form of negative partisanship.
We don’t like the incoming party, so we’ll try the opposite party. We don’t like them once they’re in power; we go back. And this really has become manifest in our politics since the emergence of the Tea Party back in 2010.
The other strand is that in some ways, this is an inheritor to Ross Perot.
Perot himself, of course, was a very wealthy individual. He capitalized on the dissatisfaction with both parties and also emphasized deficit spending and the out-of-control budget, as he put it at the time. That’s also part of what Musk is saying in terms of the trillions added to the deficit by Trump.
Perot capitalized on this enormous dissatisfaction and distrust with government. In a lot of ways, Perot is the antecedent of Donald Trump, but that dissatisfaction continues, so it opens up opportunities for Musk, potentially.
WOLF: You mentioned the Tea Party. That was a movement within the Republican Party, whereas Musk is essentially trying to create, by force of his billions, one man’s political party. So it seems like they’re kind of the opposite.
WHITE: They are, in that sense, but the whole movement stems from the same strand — the dissatisfaction with both parties. That is a through line that Musk is trying to build upon. He’s saying, ‘Are you dissatisfied with the parties? Would you like a third choice?’ Which Americans always say they want until they’re faced with that particular choice. The idea that we have another option seems good until it’s that third party and that candidate and that person that appears, and then suddenly, not so much.
WOLF: We have a history of these kinds of splinter parties in this country. There’s the Bull Moose Party, the Dixiecrats, the Know Nothings. You mentioned the Tea Party. Do you see any other corollaries and in more distant history?
WHITE: Go back to Theodore Roosevelt. He was extremely dissatisfied with his (handpicked) successor, William Howard Taft. Having left the country for a couple of years after the presidency and come back, that dissatisfaction grew and grew and grew. He also had behind him a populist movement whereby he was bucking the party establishment, running in primaries, winning them, but of course, losing at the convention.
He did want to pursue additional reforms and was very specific about the reforms that he wanted to undertake, some of which were undertaken by (Democratic President Woodrow) Wilson.
The difference with Roosevelt is that he had been a president, so he’s the all-time king in terms of third parties and the amount of support he got.
But that movement fades over time because you have election laws that favor both parties, because they write them.
If you go back even further to the emergence of the Republican Party, it basically started as a grassroots movement. In other words, it did not start from the top down, but from the bottom up. And this is where third parties tend to have some success. We’re not seeing that with Musk. It’s all top-down.
WOLF: Trump is himself riding a populist movement. Is there some chance that Musk could tap into something that is not being spoken to by Republicans? Or does that seem unlikely to you?
WHITE: The Trump coalition is beginning to fracture, and in a lot of ways, there is historical precedent for this.
Trump and Grover Cleveland have a lot in common besides serving non-contiguous terms as president.
Their commonalities, when you dig into it, are absolutely striking. Cleveland won a very close election the first time around. He lost a very close election the second time around, and during Benjamin Harrison’s term, there was a nostalgia for Cleveland that developed largely, by the way, because of very unpopular tariff law. Cleveland built on that nostalgia.
He was also above the Democratic Party and had bucked the party bosses. He had a common touch with a party base that absolutely adored him.
But in the second term, his coalition began to fracture, in part, because he wanted to marry basically the old Southern Democrats with the Western Populists, and particularly around the issue of tariffs. He wanted low tariff rates. Cheaper goods. And also this would appeal to the Northern urban (ethnic groups) that were working in manufacturing and industry.
That idea completely failed and we entered into a financial panic. The parallel with Trump is that you have business that does not want tariffs. It would agree with Musk, at least secretly, that tariffs are a very bad idea for business in a 21st-century global economy. You have a Hispanic population that gravitated to Trump in significant terms that is now showing dissatisfaction with the universal deportations of people without due process.
You’re beginning to see this coalition slowly begin to unravel. Musk is trying to take a piece of that and turn it into something bigger. But the problem with Musk is he is so erratic. It’s also a function of a system where billionaires have power and money and can attempt to build their own organizations — again, all from the top down, not from the bottom up.
WOLF: He’s erratic, but he’s also weird politically. He’s forming the party, he says, to deal with the national debt, but he also built his company on subsidies for green cars. He’s an immigrant who enabled an anti-immigrant president. He is concerned about climate change. He is so politically unique that it almost feels like there is no other person that could join this party.
WHITE: And also being so erratic in terms of just his personality. He’s forming this party today, and tomorrow he may abandon the whole idea. Or he may choose candidates that that at least enough Republicans find completely unacceptable.
I hate to put it this way, but if you have a dictator versus a plutocrat, and Putin’s Russia is a very good example of this, the dictator always wins. This is Trump’s Republican Party. He controls it. He owns it. He tolerates no dissent within it. That is unusual in American politics. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — they had dissenters within their own parties they had to mollify and whose voices became louder over time.
Trump doesn’t have any of that. The dissenters are in exile, or they’re not running again, or they feel so threatened that they yield to whatever Trump wants to do. He feels much more empowered than he did during his first term.
WOLF: Musk’s strategy is to pick a few races and flood them with money. Could that be like a sneaky way to accomplish something here? There are such small margins, both the House and the Senate. If he could replicate Thomas Massie in a couple of different places, you could in theory have an important coalition.
WHITE: That’s his only way of succeeding. It’s not by electing these people; it’s by being the difference-maker in the partisan vote. So perhaps he floods the zone in a North Carolina Senate race. Perhaps he finds another Thomas Massie to run in House races. When you have a three-seat margin in the House, yeah, we’re talking about elections being on the knife’s edge.
WOLF: The ideas of fringe or splinter parties, they get sucked up into the Republicans and the Democrats. That’s their importance. Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat, but certainly his democratic socialism has informed some of what Democrats are doing. It’s the same with libertarians like Ron Paul and Republicans. Musk seems to be the inverse of that, where he is trying to essentially suck something out of Republicans.
WHITE: Think of Elon Musk as a vacuum cleaner to suck some of the lifeblood out of the Trump Coalition, which is showing signs of weakness.
Third parties historically, they’re like Roman candles. They burn brightly for a moment or two, and then they fade. One of the reasons that some of them do fade is because they have a good idea, or two or three, that is appropriated by one or both of the major parties.
Perot had balancing the budget. Bill Clinton thought that was not a bad idea, and the New Democrats thought that was a very good idea. Lots of the Republican class of 1994 thought that was a very good idea, and so they became the vacuum cleaners to suck the lifeblood out of what Perot had done in 1992 and diminished him in 1996. By 2000, the Reform Party is now Pat Buchanan’s party, which had nothing to do with Perot’s stated purpose for it.
So the question is, does Musk have a good idea or two that might sustain him in the long term? Despite the flow of money that he has to make a difference in some key races, can he, in fact, latch on to an idea that has enough popular support that he can build a base underneath what he’s trying to do from the top down? So far, I don’t see it.
WOLF: Musk’s motivating issue is the debt. That’s an issue that actually nobody wants to really talk seriously about, Republicans nor Democrats. In the next 10 years, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds could both literally start running out of money. That will force Americans to come to terms with that issue. Is it possible he’s kind of ahead of the curve here?
WHITE: Here’s the thing I would consider, which is that Americans, for decades and decades and decades, going back, certainly to the Vietnam War period, distrusted government, and that distrust of government has grown and grown and grown and with it all institutions of government: the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all at record lows. But what Americans, I think, are coming to understand in the first six months of the second Trump presidency is there are some aspects of government they really like. They like Social Security. They like Medicare. They like Medicaid and they like food stamps, and these two prevent children, especially, from going hungry.
They like government involvement when there is a natural disaster, such as what happened in Texas, and when you attempt to dismantle all of that, then you have this backlash that may be starting to build.
