Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara
Palmeri.
We are five days away from the inauguration and people are asking me about the best parties around town, and… it feels weird. D.C. hasn’t really partied for an incoming administration since Obama’s inauguration in 2008. The town was horrified by Trump 1.0, Biden had Covid and a January 6 hangover, and a reelect is never really the same type of party. But Republicans, and even some journalists who were tired of
the subtle abuse by the Biden administration, are oddly optimistic—at least for now. Let’s see how they feel when governance hangs on every Truth, and Elon is firing off missives on X. More on that strange pairing, below the fold.
Meanwhile, the goodbye parties continue for the outgoing Biden team. Although mostly bittersweet affairs, there was a surprising guest at Merrick Garland’s farewell event at the Department of Justice:
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Sure, there were beat reporters there, too, and other cable anchors like CNN’s Kaitlan Collins—likely there attempting to secure the first Garland interview, like Maddow. But Maddow, unique among TV personalities for her liberal-icon status—and fresh off an agreement to return to primetime five days a week for the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency—was absolutely mobbed at the reception, with well-wishers asking to take
photos with her after. “Aretha Franklin sang at Eric Holder’s going away, but for this crowd, Rachel Maddow was on that level,” said a source at the party. “I’ve never in years of attending the D.O.J. parties seen people asking for pictures—and every famous anchor usually comes.”
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Abby Livingston
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Mike Johnson shocked Capitol Hill last night when
he removed Ohio Republican Mike Turner as the House Intelligence Committee chairman. Historically, the intel committee has been made up of mature members who get along with leadership, and until Trump’s first term, it was rarely at the center of Capitol Hill drama.
Turner is one of the waning Republicans from the pre-Trump era left standing, and is well regarded
among Democrats and many Republicans. (Intel Democratic ranking member Jim Himes said Johnson’s decision sent “a shiver down my spine.”) The immediate conventional-wisdom assumption was that Johnson fired Turner, an unwavering supporter of Ukraine, on Trump’s orders, a charge that the speaker and the Trump camp denied. And yet that assumption seems perfectly plausible
given Trump’s unique interest in the House Intelligence Committee during his first term.
Some insiders have speculated, however, that the situation may be more nuanced. Unlike other committee leadership posts, House Intel isn’t decided by the Republican steering committee—the intel chair serves at the pleasure of the speaker. I was told by one Republican operative that Turner may simply have been a
casualty of the biennial chess game that every House leader plays in trying to make everyone happy with their committee assignments. Put simply, in order to please other members, Turner got the shaft.
Committee assignments are the most divisive choices a speaker makes. Members who don’t get their preferred assignments tend to harbor jealousy and bitterness toward leadership that can linger for
years. But the removal of a chairman is another thing altogether—a humiliation that abruptly concludes the peak of Turner’s career. Rick Crawford, his successor, makes sense on paper: He’s next in line in seniority, and, unlike Turner, is more of an isolationist, which is increasingly in vogue in the G.O.P.
John Boehner used to punish his rebels by
taking away committee assignments, which partially explains why the Freedom Caucus eventually, and gleefully, pushed him out of office. Johnson, however, only has a three-member margin. After Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz vacate the House to serve in the Trump administration, it will be nearly impossible to pass a party-line vote
with any Republican defectors—including, hypothetically, a former intel committee chair still mighty pissed off about losing his post.
In this environment, every House Republican has the capacity to blow up—or even just slow down—every bill that goes to the floor. If provoked, an aggrieved member can stir up mischief by not showing up for tight votes. It did not escape notice within House Republican circles that Turner missed votes both on Wednesday and
today.
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And now, the latest on the Trump-Musk partnership…
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The H-1B visa scrape, and Bannon’s attempt to drive a wedge between
Musk and Trump’s MAGA faithful, has many inside Mar-a-Lago wondering just how long this political and ideological tryst can last. Some find that the world’s richest man undercuts the people who keep the trains running in Trumpworld, but his endless wealth has kept many in line.
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It was somewhat odd to hear Joe Biden, in his
farewell address, sounding a lot like Steve Bannon, warning about the “tech-industrial complex” and “an oligarchy taking shape.” But veiled animosity toward Elon Musk is one of a few things uniting the left and right these days, after Musk enraged the MAGA base with his vow to “fight to the death” to expand the H-1B visa program and bring more high-skilled foreign tech workers to America. Naturally, this positioning did not sit well with hardcore immigration
restrictionists, who view the program as a Trojan horse for cheap labor.
Bannon, viewing the H-1B dispute as an opening to assert himself as the movement’s true standard-bearer, spent the past two weeks trashing Musk in foreign publications, calling him an “evil guy” and vowing to jettison him from Donald Trump’s orbit before the inauguration—a mere four days from now. “Steve has a
robust feel for where the base is at any time,” a Bannon-aligned MAGA influencer told me, describing his preoccupations as “an early warning system.” But in this battle, at least, he seems to have miscalculated. Trump, who has often extolled the benefits of skilled immigration, eventually sided with Elon.
That’s not entirely surprising, especially given Trump’s own
longtime use of the H-2B visa program at his properties. But the cognitive dissonance has sent anti-immigration allies scrambling for more sinister explanations. “Everyone thinks that Steve is right on the substance, but they’re too afraid of Elon to push back,” one source said. “They need a donor.”
By way of juxtaposition, others have noted the sudden disappearance of Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s DOGE co-chair and co-combatant in the H-1B dustup, who blamed America’s “culture of mediocrity” for a lack of homegrown tech talent. Vivek, who was ubiquitous on social media until that episode, hasn’t posted on X since. So far, at least, Ramaswamy is not getting a DOGE office next to Musk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
In fact, there are reports that he’s being pushed as a candidate for J.D. Vance’s open Senate seat in Ohio—perhaps a backhanded reward that simultaneously banishes him from the inner circle. In any case, I’m told, Ramaswamy is being iced out.
The most public outcry over Musk’s betrayal has been limited to the fringe, such as far-right personality Laura Loomer, the racist
conspiracy theorist who lost her verified status on X after attacking Musk over the H-1B issue. Since then, she told me, she’s seen her profile visits decrease by 83 percent—resulting in a $10,000 per month loss of revenue on the platform. Now she, too, is crying oligarchy. “The Republican Party has been bought out by tech billionaires, so they’re not going to say anything about it,” Loomer said—noting that some of Trumpworld’s biggest immigration hawks, including Stephen
Miller, Donald Trump Jr., and Vance, stayed conspicuously silent during the social media skirmish over H-1Bs. “It’s ridiculous, because I’m a Trump loyalist and now I’m being punished. I am the most loyal Trump supporter out there,” Loomer told me.
Musk’s wealth and staggering influence has insulated him from a reckoning with the broader MAGA faithful, at least
for now. He’s still at the epicenter of power, but there’s a strain of suspicion toward him among Trump’s original disciples—specifically, the white working-class coalition that Bannon helped amass, in 2016, and that are a different breed from the Musk-led legion of tech megadonors, crypto bros, and Gen Z fanboys who converted for Trump in 2024. The Bannon and Musk camps together helped send Trump back to the White House. But with their shared Democratic enemy vanquished, they’ve turned their
guns on each other.
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“The Native Tongue of MAGA”
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Some of Trump’s henchmen, too, are privately suspicious of Musk,
whom they view as a quasi-libertarian who’s opportunistically leaning into border issues and race panic to cosplay Trumpian bona fides. “In his heart, does he really believe those things?” said one MAGA figure. Elon is not “100 percent fluent in the native tongue of MAGA,” another source said, but he became the movement’s premium sponsor despite a lack of institutional knowledge. Meanwhile, he’s more unpredictable and erratic than Trump himself. “Nobody is quite sold on who he actually is,” the
source added.
Indeed, Musk’s proximity to Trump has alienated certain people charged with operating the next White House. Some have whispered that Musk is dismissive of chief of staff Susie Wiles—whom the staff exalts—and that he parades into meetings unbidden. “He’s not great to the staff,” said a source familiar with the situation. “He wanders into these meetings—six months
of work and he can throw it out.” Others close to the president-elect rejected that characterization as inaccurate, and even, perhaps, an attempt to drive a wedge between Trump’s allies where none exists.
When asked for comment, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung offered this: “These sources are full of shit and have no idea what they are talking about. Instead of making up outright lies,
they should focus their time on self-reflection to better understand what happened in their lives that led them down this dark path. It is a well-known fact that Susie has helped President Trump assemble the most competent and experienced team in history to implement the America First agenda the people of this country voted for.”
Critics presume that familiarity will breed contempt, especially once Musk
moves into an office across the street from Trump’s own. But in strange ways, Musk’s gonzo political style seems to have worked in his favor. The Musk management philosophy—which can be distilled as a maniacal focus on microscopic details in the spirit of breaking down an enterprise before building it back up—hasn’t been fully tested in the realm of politics. The person who came closest was probably Trump himself, who saw his first-term agenda hamstrung by his lack of knowledge about Washington
procedures and mores. Musk, too, is a neophyte in the ways of Washington, and without allies on the Hill.
Anyway, Musk could buy an army of operatives to teach him the ways of Washington—he’s already hired Chris Young and has been working with Generra Peck and Phil Cox on his America PAC. Meanwhile, he has the resources to
fund primary challenges against incumbents who thwart Trump’s agenda—Chris LaCivita would be a natural ally in this endeavor—and he has law firms and public affairs shops dying to work for him. “He’s in such a unique spot—there’s no historic parallel, other than a really powerful presidential spouse, like a Nancy Reagan, whom you had to keep happy,” one K Street veteran told me. “At the same time, everyone is like, How long can this last?”
Trump has shown there are limits to Musk’s sway—he rejected Musk’s advocacy of Howard Lutnick for treasury secretary in favor of Scott Bessent, for instance, and declined to support Rick Scott for Senate majority leader. There are also frustrations with Musk on the Hill, where his last-minute intervention in Mike Johnson’s spending bill led the
government to the brink of a shutdown. “Senators get the joke a little bit more,” said a former Senate aide. “They see Musk as a crazy donor. Everyone is being polite, but most people question the longevity he has here. There’s too much ego for the whole relationship to not blow up.”
And yet, Sam Nunberg, the political consultant and Trump 2016 advisor, disagrees with this increasingly popular sentiment that the bromantasy must end. “Everybody keeps
saying that Trump may be getting tired of him, but here’s the thing: Elon’s still there,” Nunberg said. “He’s the largest donor of all time. He ran his national get-out-the-vote movement. He campaigned in Pennsylvania and targeted young males. He runs the largest [electric] automotive company, and that’s one of his side projects. He’s not going anywhere.”
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