Two More Lessons in Predictability from America

The Trump-Musk quarrel and HR1 (the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’): do either of them surprise anyone?

On the outcome of the presidential election last November I predicted on Twitter/X, in the account since blocked by Musk in his role as champion of free speech, that the bromance would not last six months. Two such egos, as inflated as they are infantile, could not co-exist for long. And so it has turned out. It would be a pass-the-popcorn moment at the Comedy Club if it were not so serious; the wrecking-ball activities of both men have already done existential damage, the shock waves reaching far beyond the US’s own shores; people are losing jobs and opportunities in countries around the world because of it – I could cite instances very close to home – and shifted global realities in a negative direction.

When money and power put people above the law, as they do with Musk and Trump, the state and its economy become their plaything. Long ago Livy noted that republican Rome began its rise to eminence when its citizens expelled their kings, the Tarquins, and replaced them with the rule of law. When agreed and just laws rule rather than lawless capricious men, he pointed out, things go better: simple as that. The precipitous decline of America is the work of dysfunctional individuals exercising supralegal power – not just Trump and Musk, but the authoritarian ideologues behind Project 2025. It is a familiar pattern, the last major endpoints of its remorseless logic manifesting under the names of Nazism and Stalinism. Of course the pattern is exemplified in many other places too – mention Hungary, Turkey, India, Indonesia, China, Russia, Venezuala, and with them the aspirations of far-right political parties in Europe and elsewhere, cloaking themselves in some cases under the hollowed-out shell of a system that retains the cosmetics of democracy or quasi-democracy, and one sees it. But the pattern itself, the manner of its unfolding and intended destination, are undisguisable.

The US is heading along that route, and to hasten the journey it has turned the tenets of Project 2025 into a piece of legislation designed to dismantle the state and immunise the power-holders against challenge and redress: the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. The bill is 1038 pages long, dense with legalistic bureaucratese, intended to overwhelm attention – already members of Congress have been caught out for not having read it – but fortunately a few scrutinisers have spotted such sections as 70302 which immunises the provisions of the bill from legal challenge, violating the principle that no law should be invulnerable to review and repeal – and thus gives absolute power to the executive in respect of the provisions’ application.

The chief aim of HR1 is to strip out health, social security, affordable housing and social equity funding and hand it to the wealthy in tax cuts; to reverse environmental protections, end clean energy incentives, and promote fossil fuel extraction; to lower nutrition, welfare and education standards; to cut foreign aid; to raise barriers to immigration and reduce help to current immigrants; to leave individuals to the mercy of the marketplace without mitigations or a safety-net; and in general to unpick the social contract that has – to anyway rather limited and ever-fraying effect in practice – existed since F. D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ to maintain some measure of cohesion in society. At the same time spending on defence and homeland security is to rise significantly, which means that, coupled with tax cuts, the deficit is projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to rise by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. The US is already $36.2 trillion in debt (the current debt limit is set at $32.1 trillion, so has been exceeded already), and the bill provides for raising the debt ceiling by a further $4 trillion. The effect of Trump’s tariffs has been to raise interest on US treasury bonds – the means by which the US government borrows money – adding further billions to the deficit in its turn.

HR1 offers itself under the pretence of reform in the interests of efficiency, frugality and security, but the net effect is to exacerbate social injustice, raise the national debt to even greater heights, dynamite efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce environmental damage, and not least (vide the infamous §70302) to impose ‘restriction on enforcement’, a pre-emptive block against oversight, repeal or judicial review of its provisions – and thereby to achieve impunity. The path to restoring monarchy in the US receives further clearance by its means.

Musk objects to HR1 on the grounds of its profligacy, not its massive increase of insecurity in food, health, housing and welfare for less-well-off Americans. He had been appointed DOGE supremo to cut government spending in just these ways, but suspicion that it is such provisions as loss of subsidies (via tax credits) to electric vehicles that truly sting him. Both he and Trump are indifferent to the effects of spending cuts on people and the quality of government administration; both are happy enough to lower taxes to do this, thereby benefitting the wealthy; but Musk wishes that to be the end of it, without the rises in military and homeland security spending that outweigh the savings thus made – at ordinary people’s expense of course.

Their quarrel is therefore not about concern for people, but about money. It takes the undignified form of infants throwing things at each other. The One Big Beautiful Bill, which has triggered the fall-out, is about remaking the US in the Project 2025 image, and forcing the people to pay for the change. Both these things were to be expected, once the election result was declared last November. But that fact doesn’t make either the quarrel less squalid or the bill more palatable. What should not surprise anyone is that both were so easily predictable.