Tech magnate Elon Musk's ongoing fusillade against President Donald Trump's first major domestic policy legislation is now giving Republicans "political cover" to oppose it for various reasons.
That's according to conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch, who blamed Musk's tirade for the growing trickle of Republican senators speaking out against it. In a Wednesday interview with CNN host Anderson Cooper, Goldberg said that while he thinks some version of the bill may eventually pass in a Republican-controlled Congress, the South African centibillionaire's opposition may actually end up dividing the MAGA coalition itself in the long run.
"No one in the Senate or the House wants to be the one responsible for the thing going down in flames. And that pressure, I still think will get it to pass, but it's less likely now," Goldberg said. "I think this is giving people some political cover. You see also in the House now, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are saying, 'there's things in here I didn't know were in there that i voted for,' and you can tell that support is unraveling. And the longer this takes, the harder it's going to go."
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Goldberg's point that Republicans are walking back their support of the bill has been proven several times in recent days. In addition to Greene's statement that she wouldn't have voted for the bill had she known it would ban states from regulating artificial intelligence (AI) for 10 years, other ardent Trump supporters have also been criticizing the legislation.
On Wednesday, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) expressed concern about one provision in the legislation that would put states on the hook for paying for food stamps for the first time in history. The Alabama senator — and Republican gubernatorial candidate as of late May — said he wasn't sure states "can afford it." His opposition comes after pro-Trump Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have been assailing the bill for ballooning the federal deficit by trillions of dollars.
Goldberg argued that the fractious nature of the MAGA coalition has been exposed as a result of Musk's efforts to tank the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," calling it "this absolutely weird, polyglot dog's breakfast of a coalition with all sorts of competing interests and personalities and demographics."
"The only thing holding it together is basically the cult of personality of Trump," he said. "And what I think we're going to see about this is that this is the beginning of that coalition starting to come apart. The Silicon Valley bros are starting to distance themselves, and we'll see others."
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Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.