Elon Musk “rented” a booth at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and didn’t leave until Christmas, according to a recent New York Times article. Musk is expected to return next week.
Since election night, Musk has been staying at Banyan, one of the closest cabins to the main house at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his circle of relatives are staying. While other members of Trump’s entourage also stayed on the property, none have been as consistent as the billionaire CEO, sources familiar with the matter told the Times.
Trump is said to have boasted about the fact that the world’s richest man is “renting out” one of his properties. But no one knows if Trump will end up charging Musk for the stay. The Banyan typically rents for around $2,000 a night. Trump reportedly increased the club’s annual payment to Mar-a-Lago to $1 million.
This highlights how close Trump and Musk are this year, and especially since the election. The Times noted that Trump posted a private message to Musk on Truth Social that read, “Where are you? » When are you coming to the “Center of the Universe”, Mar-a-Lago?Bill Gates asked to come tonight. We miss you yx!New Year’s Eve is going to be amazing!! DJT. “
Other members of Trump’s inner circle have complained about this bromance, complaining that Musk is crossing a line. Musk tried to smooth things over with posts about X, but the “President Musk” meme persists.
Laura Loomer is still ahead of Elon Musk.
Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room, the anti-immigration activist on Monday called the billionaire a “welfare queen” and a technocrat with enormous influence in American politics because of her current relationship with Donald Trump.
“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?” Loomer posited.
The self-proclaimed “white advocate” in a social media feud with the Tesla CEO last week over Musk’s fiery defense of the H-1B paint visa program, which he says offers a solution to a “permanent shortage of suitable engineers. “Far-right parties at odds with the immigration program (and Musk’s position) say the H-1B visa deters corporations from hiring U. S. labor.
In several posts, Loomer accused Musk of “buying his way into MAGA,” claimed he was a pawn of China and said a “divorce” between the “class five” and President-elect Donald Trump was on the horizon.
That was enough to strip Loomer of her verified prestige on the site, a loss that she said justified a public call for Musk to reinstate her blue check. Loomer has been banned from virtually every social media platform due to his inflammatory and violent rhetoric.
The H-1B visa program has an annual limit set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreigners per year. In 2023, there were estimated to be more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the United States, according to the American Immigration Council.
The worst user you know made some wonderful arguments pic. twitter. com/26uPBN0xzD
The German government has accused Elon Musk of using his platform X to influence their election.
“It is true that Elon Musk will influence the federal elections,” German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told reporters on Monday. He added that Musk does not dare to express his opinion on German politics: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest absurdities. »
“Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose,” Musk said in response on X, referring to current German chancellor and center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.
Musk has been making his campaign transparent for Germany’s right-wing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party for weeks. Earlier this month, the billionaire wrote: “Only the AfD can save Germany. » Last week, he wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag in which he criticized the party, calling it “the last spark of hope. ”
“The AfD, described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are being ignored by the establishment,” Musk wrote. “Portraying the AfD as far-right is obviously incorrect, given that Alice Weidel, the party leader, has a same-sex Sri Lankan spouse! Does this remind you of Hitler? Come on!”
The newspaper’s opinion editor resigned after this article was published.
Musk has also been hugely influential as a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, and will most likely continue to be as he co-runs DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy.
As for Germany, the effects of its interference are unknown. Their election will take place on February 23, 2025.
In the wake of his death, hundreds of obituaries have memorialized President Jimmy Carter as a devoted and disciplined public servant. President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976, described the 100-year-old Democrat as a man and politician who “embodied the most fundamental human values.”
But few eulogies for the one-term Georgian have underscored his firm moral positions on U.S. foreign policy, which effusively torched both parties for transforming the United States into what he once described as “the most warlike country on earth.”
These are some of his most difficult quotes:
1. “A superpower not only should be the top country as far as military power is concerned, which we’re going to continue to be, but I think that the American superpower goal should be to be the champion of peace, and to be the champion of human rights, and to be the champion of the environment, and to be the most generous nation on earth,” Jimmy Carter said in 2015, later highlighting that the U.S. had been at peace for just 16 of the 242 years that it had existed as a nation.
“We had no reason to worry about Iraq recently,” Carter told The Independent in 2004, long before the top political figure dared to criticize the U. S. invasion. “It is a war based on lies and misinterpretations by London and Washington. “
“We cannot be peacemakers if the leaders of the United States government are seen as reckless supporters of each and every action or policy of the current Israeli government. This is an essential fact that will have to be faced. Carter wrote those words in Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, criticizing Israel for its failure to end its profession of Palestine, its apartheid system, and its continued punishment of Palestinians.
Faced with a backlash from right-wing lobby groups about Israel, Carter doubled down, saying that a balanced debate about the two nations was “virtually nonexistent” in Congress and the executive branch, and blaming American leaders for being in Israel’s pocket.
Despite direct orders from President-elect Donald Trump, some House Republicans appear to be in a position to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Trump voiced his pro-Johnson on Monday, just two weeks after the president clashed with several House Republicans outraged over proposing a lengthy bipartisan bill to fund the government. And despite Trump’s deployment, not all Republicans are following suit.
Rep. Andy Biggs is the latest to sign off on his reluctance to stick to the president-elect’s marching orders. During an interview on Fox News on Monday, the Arizona Republican said he’s not yet in Johnson’s bag.
“I haven’t publicly or privately committed yet,” said Biggs. “I do want to speak with the speaker just to see what his plans are, because there are some issues that I think need to be worked out, specifically dealing with the budget issues.”
Representative Thomas Massie doubled down on his opposition to Johnson in a post on X Monday, reckoning back to another unpopular House speaker Trump once championed.
“I respect President Trump, but his for Mike Johnson is going to work just as well as his for President Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote. “We have seen that Johnson has teamed up with Democrats to send cash to Ukraine, enable spying on Americans, and blow up the budget. “
Faced with his amazement at Trump’s trial, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk responded: “You may be right, but let’s see how it goes. “»
Massie wasn’t the only one who mentioned Ryan. Rep. Victoria Spartaz asked Johnson on Monday how he would follow Trump’s timeline to the letter before deigning to help him as president.
“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important. However, we still need to get assurances that @SpeakerJohnson won’t sell us out to the swamp,” she wrote in a post on X Monday.
Spartz sent Johnson a list of demands, adding a request for “impartial, non-swampy professionals” for him to do his job. The two men are expected to discuss the list at a town hall meeting on Monday.
Steve Bannon thinks that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.
“We have fought those battles for years and years to allow American citizens of all races, ethnicities and religions to be eviscerated by the sociopathic overlords of Silicon Valley,” Bannon said at his War Room exhibit Monday morning. “David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk… there is no reform. We need this to go away. . . We need reparations for the technical staff whose lives you stole.
This is a new episode in the existing schism between the “America First” MAGA faithful and the MAGA plutocrats of the tech world who need more highly professional immigrants. Former presidential candidate and current DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy started the fire last week by saying, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen more than the math Olympiad champion, or the athlete than the valedictorian, does not will produce the most productive engineers,” stating that it was American culture that led CEOs to look at This topic of discussion was taken up through Elon Musk and other right-wing techies, sparking a MAGA backlash that even included Nikki Haley, the torchbearer of the old Republican status quo who was defeated by Trump earlier this year.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
This anti-H-1B power culminated in Bannon’s calls for reparations, a measure invoked for African Americans traditionally disenfranchised due to slavery and racism.
“We’re going to get the H-1B visas out, root and root, and all the staff that you brought. Just as we’re deporting another 15 million people here, we need them to be deported,” Bannon later said. his program. ” And giving those jobs to American citizens today. . . We ask that they obtain reparations. You stole from them.
Donald Trump attempted to stem the rising tide of opposition to House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday with a message endorsing his re-election, but the question of whether all House Republicans are interested in getting back on the bandwagon It’s a question. any other query.
In a rambling piece in Truth Social on Monday, Trump suggested the “COMMON SENSE Party” to Johnson’s bid to retain the gavel in the new year.
“LET’S NOT WASTE THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY THAT THEY HAVE GIVEN US. Fellow Americans want IMMEDIATE relief from all of the last administration’s destructive policies. President Mike Johnson is a good, hard-working and devoted man. He will do the right thing and we will continue WINNING. Mike has my complete and utter approval. “MAGA!!!” he wrote. Most of the words in the post are true to his own “flawless” re-election campaign.
By expressing support for Johnson, Trump has established a new loyalty check for House Republicans.
Earlier this month, Johnson came under fire after introducing a 1,547-page continuing resolution to keep the government open until March, among a slew of other bipartisan provisions, inviting the outrage of small-government types like technocrat billionaire Elon Musk, and a slate of sycophantic Republicans.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was so disappointed that he said he would not vote for Johnson in the election for speaker of the House of Representatives in January.
Johnson then worked with Trump on crafting another spending bill that suspended the debt ceiling, one of the president-elect’s main demands. But this time, 38 House Republicans broke with Trump and voted against the bill. In the end, Trump’s call To do this, Republicans find a way to raise or abolish the debt ceiling that remains unresolved.
Last week, Rep. Andy Harris, who chairs the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said Republicans want to ask themselves whether their current leadership “is what we want” and that he was “undecided” about what the House leadership will look like. Camera in the future. . .
More than a few other Republicans have similarly voiced their dissatisfaction with Johnson, as it seems that the GOP’s antiestablishment bent has turned against the party itself.
Elon Musk asks you to make X a more positive place.
The tech billionaire made the plea to his 209 million X fans on Sunday, blaming the site’s users for their declining social media spend rather than himself.
“Please post content that is a little more positive or informative on this platform,” Musk said.
X’s accounts were quick to put the ball back in Musk’s court, urging him to create a set of rules where positive content can simply proliferate.
“You first,” snapped back lawyer and bluegrass banjo player Steve Martin.
“Getting tired of the toxic wasteland you created?” replied author Karen Piper.
Musk most likely began to realize the more toxic elements of his site after becoming embroiled in a far-right dispute over H-1B work visas last week. Last week, Musk vowed to “wage war on this issue,” insisting that foreign tech staff will have to be allowed to work in the United States due to a “continuing shortage of appropriate engineering skills. ” painted Musk and other H-1B supporters, such as unofficial DOGE co-chairman Vivek Ramaswamy, as MAGA targets amid Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda (the H-1B visa program has an annual limit set through of Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it is estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the States. United States, according to data from the American Immigration Council).
But if anyone is to blame for the site’s volatile and disturbing content, it’s none other than Musk himself.
At the start of Musk’s acquisition, Twitter witnessed a mass exodus of employees, and Musk said he was only losing weight by laying off more than 80% of the site’s staff. Its “free speech agenda” has further limited and undermined the site’s content moderation capabilities, allowing harmful rhetoric to flow freely on its platform. Their dismantling of the site’s infrastructure also resulted in monumental tweaks to the online page that proved incredibly unpopular. Its modified ruleset aggressively promoted classified ads and shared accounts, restructured underclassified ads to the point where they no longer increased applicable responses, and even code-traded to make sure its own posts made the impression universally in the most sensible posts. user schedules.
But despite his defense, not even the nastiest posts seemed to bother Musk, who spread Nazi conspiracies through his private account and allowed another 105% of anti-Semitic hate speech to spread on the platform, according to a 2023 study.
Last year, the tech billionaire admitted that it had lost 90% of its price since acquiring it for $44 billion in 2022.
A three-star general in the U. S. Army believes Elon Musk’s business dealings may make him a significant national security risk.
Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré argued in a Sunday New York Times column that the SpaceX CEO’s willingness to capitulate to Chinese demands over the years should make his recent influence within Trump’s circle all the more questionable.
Honoré referenced 2023 quotes from Musk’s friend at DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, to make his point clear. “I have no explanation for thinking that Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls him in his time of need,” Ramaswamy said in an interview. “It is deeply troubling that @elonmusk met with China’s foreign minister yesterday to oppose decoupling and referred to the United States and communist China as ‘Siamese twins,'” he wrote in another that year. “The United States wants leaders who are not in China’s pocket. »
Ramaswamy has since made amends with Musk, but his concerns still apply. Musk and SpaceX have already been flagged thrice by the Air Force, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security for failing to disclose his meetings with foreign leaders, something his current security clearance requires him to do. And his China business isn’t going anywhere either.
Musk has borrowed at least $1.4 billion from Chinese government–controlled banks to pay for his massive Tesla “gigafactory” in Shanghai. He borrowed this money knowing full well that China’s laws allow the Chinese Communist Party to demand information from any company doing business in China in exchange for doing business there—a huge red flag for Honoré.
“Mr. Musk’s business dealings in China may simply require him to disclose sensitive and classified information, downloaded either through his business interests or by his proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. No federal firm has charged him with disclosing such documents, so far as Mr. S. S. . United States What we want is for China to have a potentially less difficult way to download classified intelligence and national security information.
This angered both Democrats and Republicans. In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio accused Tesla of obstructing justice for the CCP, and in 2023 he introduced a bill to prevent NASA and other federal agencies from awarding contracts to corporations related to the Chinese Communist Party. Two Democratic senators recently called for an investigation into Musk’s “trustworthiness as a government contractor and permit holder” because of his phone call with Vladimir Putin.
The line between civilians and elected officials is becoming more blurred as Musk becomes more entrenched in Trump’s inner circle. As Honoré wrote, the world’s richest man’s investment in Trump’s return to the presidency “does not give the new White House the right to turn a blind eye to the dangers he may pose to national security. “
President Joe Biden is funneling budget to Ukraine before Donald Trump takes the reins of the US reaction to the conflict.
The outgoing leader announced another $6 billion in military and budgetary aid to Ukraine on Monday. About $1. 25 billion in military aid comes from U. S. stockpiles, and some other $1. 22 billion comes from Ukraine’s latest security aid package during Biden’s tenure, Reuters reported. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also said the U. S. had provided $3. 4 billion in additional budget aid for Ukraine amid the ongoing standoff with Russia.
“The Department of Defense is delivering thousands of artillery shells, thousands of rockets, and armored vehicles that will reinforce Ukraine’s position as winter approaches,” Biden said in a statement. “Under my leadership, the United States will continue to work tirelessly to Ukraine’s position in this war for the remainder of my term. “
According to Biden, the budget will be used for critical resources and air defense systems, artillery and other weapons systems in the long term.
More than 43,000 Ukrainian infantrymen have been killed since Russia invaded the Eastern European country in February 2022. Cities have been razed and 370,000 injured have been reported, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said earlier this month. But Biden’s departure from the White House could mark the end of the United States’ commitment to helping the war-torn nation.
One of Trump’s biggest and boldest crusades promised that he would end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without delay, though his philosophy on how to achieve that suspiciously dwindling of major points and at times veered toward answers that would invariably help Russia.
In June, details provided by some Trump advisers suggested that Trump would be open to expanding U. S. arms aid to Ukraine on the condition that it show up for peace talks with Russia. Advisers anticipated that peace talks would also come quietly with Ukraine ceding part of the country recently occupied by Russian forces.
And some of Trump’s domestic decisions are reportedly “thrilling” Russian mouthpieces. Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, claimed earlier this month that some of Trump’s most unqualified choices for his Cabinet—such as DOGE co-chair nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard—are friendly faces that bring the Kremlin “lots of joy.”
Meanwhile, NATO (from which Trump has long threatened to withdraw the United States) favors an escalation on the Russian front. In early December, NATO leader Mark Rutte warned its members that the foreign alliance needed to adopt a “war mentality,” predicting years of clash with Russia as the superpower crushes Ukrainian forces.
“Russia is in favor of a long-term confrontation, with Ukraine and with us,” Rutte said in a speech in Brussels in which he highlighted the short distance to where “Russian bombs fall. . . Iranian drones fly” and “the North “Korean soldiers” are fighting. »
“We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years,” the secretary-general continued. “It is time to shift to a wartime mindset, and turbocharge our defense production and defense spending.”