Mike Johnson has spent his 19 months as speaker forging a close relationship with President Donald Trump — in part to avoid the social-media bombshells that derailed so many Republican priorities during Trump’s first term.
Now he has to deal with another, perhaps even more unpredictable online bomb-thrower.
Elon Musk’s decision to launch a sudden scorched-earth campaign against the GOP’s domestic-policy megabill has forced Johnson into a sudden scramble to save the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda.
Starting in the moments Tuesday after Musk first called the bill a “disgusting abomination” through the tech mogul’s open breach Thursday with Trump, the speaker has mounted a multi-front rebuttal to the criticism — aiming to keep the backlash from spinning out of control.
That has included questioning Musk’s personal motives for opposing the bill, challenging Musk’s claims (backed up by independent scorekeepers) about the bill’s fiscal impact, promising other legislative actions that will address Musk’s concerns and otherwise questioning the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s understanding of the legislative process.
“Look, I’m a fiscal hawk myself,” an exasperated Johnson told reporters Wednesday evening. “If I could cut $8 trillion in federal spending today, I would do it, but I do not have the votes for that. So, this is a deliberative body. It requires consensus. It took us over a year to reach the consensus, to get 217 votes necessary to make the cuts that we have.”
He described a “multiple step process” for securing conservative wins that includes the spending “rescissions” Republicans are now pursuing, as well the upcoming fiscal 2026 appropriations process and the prospect of “another reconciliation package” in addition to the megabill.
“There may be a third one,” Johnson floated, adding that “we have to do it in the proper sequence.”
It remains unclear just how effective Musk’s attacks will be with Republican lawmakers — especially after he openly attacked Trump, suggesting without evidence the president was implicated in wrongdoing with the late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Most in the GOP enthusiastically embraced the charismatic automaker and rocketeer as he fully aligned himself last year with Trump and the GOP, and they cheered on his chaotic bureaucracy-slashing efforts in the White House.
But they also see Trump, not Musk, as their political lodestar and so far there is no sign the president is wavering on the legislation, even after Musk told his 220 million followers on X Wednesday to call their representatives and “KILL the BILL.”
Top House leaders have publicly and privately emphasized Trump’s ongoing support for the bill. Johnson said at a Wednesday news conference that Trump is “not delighted that Elon did a 180” on the legislation.
Asked about the possibility of Musk targeting House incumbents who vote for the legislation, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise pivoted to Trump’s role as “our best, most effective deliverer of support.”
GOP leaders and White House officials have also called in backup from online conservative influencers to publicly back the bill on X and other platforms amid Musk’s all-out assault, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the private conversations.
Johnson, for instance, shared a list of “50 MAJOR wins from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that the media is ignoring” from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on his official speaker X account alongside endorsements from top Trump aide Stephen Miller and several of his own members.
The speaker has also been willing to suggest that Musk’s criticisms aren’t entirely based in conservative principle — he noted to reporters on multiple occasions that Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle firm, would be negatively affected by the termination of clean-energy tax credits in the megabill.
“I know that has an effect on his business and I lament that,” he said Tuesday, later adding in a Bloomberg TV interview Wednesday that the tax credits were “important to the leader of Tesla.”
Musk on Thursday took direct aim at Johnson, suggesting the speaker had betrayed his past views on deficit spending by pushing the megabill forward — to which Johnson responded: “The Mike Johnson of 2023 is the SAME Mike Johnson who has always been a lifelong fiscal hawk – who now serves as Speaker and is implementing a multi-stage plan to get our country back to fiscal responsibility and extraordinary economic growth.”
The main risk for Johnson right now is that Musk’s attacks could buoy fiscal hard-liners at a critical moment for the legislation, with the Senate poised to make significant changes that could reduce the size of the spending cuts in the House passed bill. The bill will then have to come back to the House for final passage, and Musk is only emboldening potential holdouts.
One such House hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said Musk’s broadsides “wouldn’t have hurt our case about two to three weeks ago.”
Perhaps even more worrying for Republicans: Musk’s critique of the bill’s fiscal impact — adding $2.4 trillion in deficits according to a new Congressional Budget Office analysis — is opening up a new line of attack on their incumbents as they work to sell the bill to the public ahead of the 2026 midterms. They’re already under heavy fire from Democrats, who are training attack ads on the GOP’s planned Medicaid cuts.
“I don’t think he’s killing the bill,” said one House GOP lawmaker. “I’m more worried he’s killing our sales pitch.”
Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who leads the House GOP campaign arm, dismissed Musk’s threats in a brief interview Wednesday evening: “He’s been a friend and he’s just wrong about this bill,” he said. “I think long term, this is nothing.”
But privately, wary GOP incumbents are noting that Musk isn’t just another scorned administration official or outspoken MAGA Republican: He poured more than $250 million into the 2024 elections to help Trump and congressional Republicans take power. His veiled threats to target Republicans in the midterms are deeply worrying to members who can’t afford to fend off Musk’s intervention in their races — or might have been hoping he’d write them a check.
For some House Republicans, however, the public break with Musk comes as a welcome development. Many have been irritated that Musk would not take responsibility for some of the chaos his slash-and-burn operation had unleashed in their districts — with some left stunned after Musk told them in a closed-door meeting back in March that his DOGE operation “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) called Musk “a brilliant businessman” but lamented that the billionaire isn’t likely to change his mind about the bill — which Gimenez described as a first step in slashing government spending.
“This is a process, and he’s an impatient person,” Gimenez said. “You have to be more patient than that.”
Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
