'Elon is missing it': Mike Johnson slams Musk for calling Trump's bill an 'abomination'
On Tuesday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk came out swinging against President Donald Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" and lawmakers who supported it in a series of tweets. And his tirade has caught the attention of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Politico congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor tweeted that Johnson is now — delicately — giving public criticism of the world's richest man and one of the largest donors to Trump's 2024 campaign. The speaker gave his remarks following Musk calling the legislation a "massive, outrageous [and] pork-filled ... disgusting abomination."
"It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt," Musk added.
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"For him to come out and pan the whole bill is, to me, just very disappointing, very surprising," Johnson said. "It's a very important first start. Elon is missing it, okay, and it's not personal."
Johnson had been previously attempting to win Musk over to his side after the South African centibillionaire recently told CBS Sunday Morning that the legislation "undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing" given its projected multitrillion-dollar cost. The speaker also admitted to sending the tech magnate a "long text message" attempting to persuade him to get behind the bill.
Musk's public criticism of Trump's first major domestic policy push is likely to further complicate the administration's attempts to get the legislation through the Senate, despite Republicans having a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber of Congress. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that it was Trump's view that Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were "blatantly wrong" for insisting that the bill would increase the federal deficit by trillions of dollars.
The version of the bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives by a 215-214 margin in May cuts federal support for Medicaid (the program that provides health insurance for low-income and disabled Americans) by hundreds of billions of dollars in order to extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts — which are overwhelmingly skewed toward the richest Americans — for another 10 years. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a Tuesday press release that the bill would result in 51,000 more Americans dying every year.
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