GOP Rep Declares Elon Musk is America’s ‘Prime Minister’

Will Neal
·2-min read
Republican Representative for Texas Tony Gonzales speaks with CBS Face the Nation
CBS / CBS

A top Republican lawmaker appears in desperate need of a lesson about how prime ministerial appointments, or even the basic principles of democracy, are actually supposed to work.

Speaking with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales was pressed by host Margaret Brennan about how tech-bro billionaire Elon Musk appears to rather successfully be turning himself into the Republican Party’s shadow leader.

Brennan asked, “What role exactly is [Musk] playing here?”

Gonzales swiftly replied, “It’s kinda interesting… we have a president, we have a vice president, we have a speaker… it feels like Elon Musk is our prime minister.”

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“Unelected,” Brennan duly pointed out.

Gonzales went on, “Unelected, but I mean, he has a voice, and a large part of that voice is a reflection of the voice of the people.”

Referring to the recent spending-bill fiasco, Gonzales went on to praise Musk for his role in razoring Democratic Party funding proposals, rather than the unmitigated chaos caused by the Tesla CEO’s online meddling that nearly prompted a government shutdown going into the Christmas period.

“A 1,500 page bill?” Gonzales said. “How does that pass the smell taste? It’s absolutely wrong, it’s what’s wrong with this place, and we have to get back to regular order.”

Whatever the GOP representative’s insistences that Musk’s unofficial prime ministership can only be a good thing for national interest, this week’s legislative chaos appears to have whipped up something of a storm behind closed doors for Republicans.

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Only on Saturday, Democratic Rep. Becca Balint revealed she’d actually overheard a number of her GOP counterparts trashing the SpaceX founder in a congressional elevator for the carnage his tweets helped create.

“He’s not been elected–I just want to remind everybody of that,” Balint told SiriusXM’s Dean Obeidallah. “He may be a very wealthy person, but he’s been elected to nothing.”

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