The video discusses the influence and power that Elon Musk is wielding over the American government, particularly under the Trump administration. It is observed that Musk has been given a substantial role in downsizing the federal government, reducing bureaucracy, and imposing significant cuts in areas such as foreign aid. The video draws comparisons between Musk's approach to managing Twitter and his current tactics in government, highlighting the rapid pace of changes he is instituting.

There is also a discussion on the potential legal and ethical implications of Musk's activities, particularly regarding access to sensitive government data and how this fits into the current political landscape. The presenters express concern about the lack of checks and balances, and how Musk's unelected position allows him to execute ideas without sufficient oversight or accountability. They also highlight the personal risks for government employees caught in this restructuring, noting the controversial methods of staffing reductions.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. doxing [ˈdɒksɪŋ] - (n.) - The act of publicly revealing private or personal information about an individual, typically with malicious intent. - Synonyms: (outing, exposing, uncovering)

So doxing is where you post their personal information and Then people can be abusive to them.

2. coterie [ˈkoʊtəri] - (n.) - A small group of people with shared interests or tastes, especially one that is exclusive of other people. - Synonyms: (clique, circle, club)

It's interesting on the subject of doxing because he's got this kind of coterie of sort of 20-year-olds, hasn't he, around him, who are actually going through some of the files...

3. ideological [ˌaɪdiəˈlɑːdʒɪkl] - (adj.) - Based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals, especially those that form the basis of economic or political theory and policy. - Synonyms: (doctrinal, theoretical, conceptual)

There is an ideological basis to what's going on as well.

4. renege [rəˈneɪɡ] - (v.) - To refuse to follow through on a promise or commitment. - Synonyms: (backtrack, default, retract)

Elon Musk did this at Twitter, as it was then called, and kind of the suggestion is maybe reneged on some of the deals that people thought they had.

5. tacit [ˈtæsɪt] - (adj.) - Understood or implied without being stated openly. - Synonyms: (implicit, unspoken, implied)

Government buildings are being possibly unlawfully accessed in an attempt to thwart the will of Congress, all with the tacit approval of President Trump.

6. monetize [ˈmʌnɪtaɪz] - (v.) - To convert something, such as an asset or interest, into money or a source of income. - Synonyms: (capitalize, commercialize, finance)

And there's, yeah, there's a real concern about why not least somebody who owns a social media platform but, you know, and can monetize this kind of stuff, having access to that

7. cartel [kɑːrˈtel] - (n.) - An association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition. - Synonyms: (syndicate, consortium, trust)

You could also say eventually they were broken up. I mean, the great kind of cartels, including the oil ones, were bussed by government.

8. supermajority [ˌsuːpərməˈdʒɔːrəti] - (n.) - A requirement for a proposal to gain a significantly greater level of support than a 50% simple majority. - Synonyms: (overwhelming majority, major majority, significant majority)

To decide that. Oh, so cynical. Well, so cynical. So young. And they go, you know, you will go through different levels of federal judges and as I say, cases have been brought already saying, for instance, that all of the DOGE staff shouldn't have access to the huge amounts of personal information about Americans.

9. ethos [ˈiːθɒs] - (n.) - The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations. - Synonyms: (spirit, character, culture)

People, if you have built a company or companies like Elon Musk has and made a huge amount of money doing it, that is a badge of success and that earns you the right to bring the same ethos into government

10. legislature [ˈledʒɪsleɪtʃər] - (n.) - A governmental body with the power to make, change, or repeal laws. - Synonyms: (congress, parliament, council)

In Pennsylvania, where I suppose he was extracting a lot of oil, the only thing he hadn't managed to refine was the legislature.

Elon Musk vs The U.S. Government - BBC News

Who is in charge in the White House? Is it Donald Trump or maybe Elon Musk? Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval. And we'll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won't. And that is because Elon Musk is moving at a pace and a scale that must have surprised even Donald Trump, who put him in charge of downsizing and slashing some of the federal government. Has so much power ever been wielded by an unelected individual? And can anyone stop him?

Welcome to AmericasT. AmericasT, AmericasT from BBC News. Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmericasT in London, England. And it is Mariana, aka Misinformation, also in the worldwide headquarters with Justin. And it's Sarah here paying a rare visit to the studio in London. So, yes, I mean, obviously I've come away from where all the action really is, is in Washington D.C. but it's a, it's a pleasure to join you both here in the wwhq. And I am wearing a tie in honor of you coming for those who are not seeing this visualize. But also I apologize to you both for making you late because we are a bit late starting because although, Sarah, you've managed to come right across the Atlantic, I assume in something like good order.

I've just come into London on a train which anyone who's recently tried to do that, or indeed go anywhere on a train in Britain will know is difficult. Anyhow, Elon Musk, you've had to drag yourself away from him, Sarah, but in the, the time that you are outside the United States, he will have done all sorts of things to the United States, we can be sure of that. Yes. You might have closed a couple of agencies or departments during the time that I'm away. It is breathtaking the speed with which he's moving through the federal government.

And Donald Trump, of course, makes so much news on a daily basis. I think we maybe haven't paid as much attention as we ought to the things that Elon Musk is doing from closing down usaid, which is like the equivalent of the Department for International Development that hands out tens of billions of dollars. Feeding it into the wood chipper, he said, didn't he? Feeding it into the wood chipper. Yeah, yeah. And yes. And he's put, you know, a 90 day hold on pretty much all foreign aid coming out of America. I think something like 40,000 federal staff have now signed up for this. It's not early retirement deferred Whatever it is, retirement, really, they're going to go, yeah, they're taking the deal because.

Because the last thing I saw was some, in fact, someone I was talking, well, who's in the federal government was saying, I'm not quite sure about taking this deal because Elon Musk did this at Twitter, as it was then called, and kind of the suggestion is maybe reneged on some of the deals that people thought they had. So you'd be nervous, wouldn't you? Unless it was watertight.

Yes, you would. And there's been quite a lot of coverage saying it's not necessarily watertight. But what he did was he offered people who they could say now that they wanted to leave and you would work through to September with pay and benefits and you would get some kind of payoff when you left. Because the threat is if you don't take that, that you're going to lose your job anyway. Because, you know, there are, there are going to be huge numbers of, I don't think redundancies is even the right word, just firings, actually, of people, some individually targeted people who are either doing jobs that Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't think need to be done, or are maybe too woke if they're working on diversity, equality and inclusion policies or something like that. But also just, you know, taking a sigh through the number of staff that there are at in the federal bureaucracy.

Well, I mean, I can tell you my friend is attached to the Veterans Administration and is a doctor and is thinking of going. So, I mean, it's not just the woke people. And indeed, it's always the case, isn't it, in these large bureaucracies, when you have a round of redundancies, those who can quite easily get work elsewhere, maybe better paid work elsewhere, well, they go. And who's left, you know, and there is. That issue, isn't there for them. And I just.

Is all of this being discussed in a sensible and mindful way online, Mariana, or something else? So I spent quite a lot of time investigating and reporting on the takeover of Twitter back at the end of 2022 into 2023. And if you look at the blueprint of what he did there, it's almost exactly the same as what he's doing now. So anyone kind of acting surprised about it is a bit silly, really, because it's the same. It's exactly the same thing. We spoke about the Fork in the road email before, which is how he laid off huge numbers of staff at Twitter and he used the same language in relation to these deals for government employees and what he was going to do about them. But even stuff like.

So he's put beds in the federal personnel office for him and his team to sleep in. He did exactly the same thing at Twitter, where he also started, like, auctioning off plants. Some of the insiders I spoke to said, like, bringing people into a room, being like, who wants what plant? There was someone who was working as an engineer at the time at Twitter in San Francisco who told me that Elon Musk would go to the loo with his bodyguards. I mean, there's like a. He kind of creates a certain environment around all of this and he was really willing to lay off huge numbers of people.

A lot of the people I spoke to at the time said, well, we think this is putting users at risk. We think lots of, just like you said, we think lots of good people are leaving because they don't feel like they, you know, they can get other jobs. I mean, the tech industry is one where there's quite a lot of jobs going and people often lose their jobs and it's kind of quickly evolving. So you'd think, like, how does this actually play out in a government context? And you imagine Donald Trump might be looking back at all this stuff with X. I mean, even stuff like the Twitter files. Do you remember when he took over Twitter and he released all of those files, which showed some evidence of.

Of bias in terms of moderation policies, but also led to the doxing and abuse of employees from Twitter. Like he's kind of, now he's got access to all sorts of things. You wonder what he's going to do, what he could release, how that works. It's interesting on the subject of doxing because he's got this kind of coterie of sort of 20 year olds, hasn't he, around him, who are actually going through some of the files have been given access, which we might talk about the legality of all of this in a second. But given.

And they've suddenly scrubbed all their social media profiles. I mean, we know some of the names, don't we, but not much about them. Yeah, well, there's been this whole drama this week, for want of a better word, around a Reddit thread. So Reddit is a forum, a bit like discord that we use. And there's, there's various threads where people had been identifying some of the people working for Doge or who, who are now possibly had access to this information and doxing them.

So doxing is where you post their personal information and Then people can be abusive to them. There was some threatening language. Reddit has subsequently suspended one of the threads, at least one of the threads where that was happening. But it's interesting because Elon Musk has quite explicitly condemned this harassment and doxxing, and yet there are lots of examples of harassment and doxing I've investigated on his platform, which he seems okay with because they're not. There are people he doesn't necessarily agree with, maybe. Who knows? Is it legal, Sarah?

Well, there are legal challenges being brought and we will find out. But of course, ultimately in the US whether or not something is legal depends on which judge you get in front of to decide that. Oh, so cynical. Well, so cynical. So young. And they go, you know, you will go through different levels of federal judges and as I say, cases have been brought already saying, for instance, that all of the DOGE staff shouldn't have access to the huge amounts of personal information about Americans that they have been able to get at. But ultimately, you know, if you follow the legal process all the way through, you end up in front of the Supreme Court, who, with a conservative super majority of Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump appointed in his first term, do tend to find in favor of him. Not always, but, you know, if it's, if they can, they do tend to come down on the side of what Donald Trump wants.

That has been their history anyway, over the last few years. But, yeah, people are very worried not only about the cuts that are being made to government services and the people who run the government, but also the personal data that these Doge staff have got access to. Because if you go into the treasury, you can get to, I mean, everything, people's Social Security numbers, which is like their national insurance number, but it is kind of more important to Americans. It's the key to everything, really, in bureaucracy, your Social Security number, all the other personal data of people.

And there's, yeah, there's a real concern about why not least somebody who owns a social media platform but, you know, and can monetize this kind of stuff, having access to that. They say they're trying to find fraud, don't they, Sarah, in Medicaid in particular. So Medicaid, the, the, the program of support for medical things, treatments, medicines, et cetera, for people who are poorer Americans or disabled. If they're going through that with a fine tooth comb and they're looking at individual cases, that is going to make you, if you're a Medicaid recipient, feel slightly queasy, particularly if at the same time You're a vocal opponent of Elon Musk, which I suppose you might be.

Yes, absolutely. And these are not necessarily people who are well qualified to look at whether or not you deserve particular medical treatment that you're getting. Because, you know, one would imagine that the government is, in theory, searching for fraud in these places all the time, but these are completely different people. These are, you know, very, very young computer scientists who are doing it now, rather than people who are well versed or qualified in being able to do this. And the other thing that's happening as well is not just cutting numbers of staff. So there will be far fewer people running the federal government, which will make a difference in every single department. For obvious reasons.

There is an ideological basis to what's going on as well. They are very deliberately getting rid of what Donald Trump would call radical left lunatics. But other people might call, you know, perfectly sane, right minded, slightly liberal members of staff who may or may not bring their personal politics and prejudices to work as well. But they are, they are rooting out anybody who they think is not ideologically aligned to the Trump presidency and will not, you know, enthusiastically enact the rather more radical things that they're saying when it comes to that.

Can they not say with some justification, it's such an interesting one this, and we've done a little bit on it before, but can they not say with some justification, the whole administrative state, all the people who work in all of these things, tend towards a view of the world that is not Donald Trump's view of the world, and frankly isn't the view of the world of at least half of the American people. So in a sense, it's a mirror image, it's the opposite, the polar opposite of what happens in the Senate, where the views of people who live in the Dakotas or Oklahoma or somewhere are hugely well represented because they get two senators each for each state, whereas people in California, where not only big cities are, but also the wealth is, the wealth creation is, they have much less of a say, you might say, in modern America than they should.

But it's the opposite with the administrative state, because the administrative state is peopled increasingly by people who think the same way. And that used not to be the case. This is the argument that once in the kind of Reagan times, you'd have had people in these various agencies, including the foreign aid agencies, who had all sorts of views about what money should be spent on. But what has happened over time is that it's kind of grouped around a certain worldview. And Elon Musk is now busting that bubble. And that, I think, is what the kind of thoughtful Trump supporter would say about why there is some justification to, to all of this.

It's interesting because again, looking at the parallels with Twitter, it was a really similar situation where he bought in quite a few engineers, people that came from other companies he'd worked for, Tesla, for example, and a lot of the engineers on the inside who worked specifically in stuff like machine learning. So, like how the algorithms work, automatic detection for content that's harmful, that sort of thing. They were like, what do these people, what do these people know about the kinds of work we do? It's, it's, it's really different in their view.

You know, it's very specialist stuff. And you can see that pattern unfolding with what Elon Musk is doing now. And the positives at the time from some of the people on the inside about that was that they said it was quite good to have people who came totally from the outside without any of the baggage that everyone else had. There's, there's maybe a benefit to having kind of fresh eyes on this stuff and like, you know, challenging people's biases, but the way in which it's done and the loss of possible expertise and kind of institutional knowledge is a pretty big deal for how a lot of these departments function.

Yeah. And without wanting to minimize what can happen when you don't have people looking at safety online and you describe the possible problems, making excessive cuts in the federal bureaucracy and then fixing problems as they come up is, I mean, quite literally a matter of life and death for some people. And there's medical and financial support coming from the federal government, federal government going to some of the least well off in America and all sorts of other programs as well, which if you cut it out completely and then go and try and fix your mistakes later, there will be people who have lost their lives as a result and it cannot be fixed. And that's, it's on a different scale.

So what's the politics of it? All that follows from that? I mean, in other words, is all of this going to turn out to be an absolute disaster politically for Donald Trump and for Elon Musk, and they fall out and Musk goes. And all the rest of it, as I think we suggested might be the case when we started talking about MAS right at the beginning, but I mean, in the immediate kind of week or so since all of this has taken shape, what has happened politically, I think there's a great deal of support for it from the people who put Donald Trump in office. The things that he has most visibly targeted, like foreign aid, not popular anyway among Trump's base and supporters.

Very easy to characterize quite a lot of the things that foreign aid money was being spent on as being too woke or not in America's national interest. I mean, what they're doing is dismantling a huge amount of America's soft power around the world as well as life saving aid that's going to certain of their programs. But Donald Trump doesn't care about that kind of soft power. He doesn't see what America gets from it in the bottom line. And so it's very, very happy to cut all of that and be the face of these cuts.

I mean, so there's no embarrassment about that whatsoever. And as they go through domestic programs as well, they will, they will say that people who are suffering from the lack of these government handouts and people who didn't deserve it in the first place are not to be able to stand on their own two feet. We would have to go really quite far, I think, to hear stories of cruelty and unfair treatment from particular individuals. Before politically, Donald Trump would PA and worry that Elon Musk had gone too far.

I do wonder if there's an attack line from the right, as it were, from the kind of old fashioned conservative Republican right that does still exist in Congress, although they're pretty quiet at the moment. But these people who, you know, back in the day when I was there and you were there at the same time, Sarah, back in the kind of run up to Obama, who were real sticklers for the national debt, which you hardly ever hear mentioned by Republicans these days, certainly not by Donald Trump. But what they would say about all of this stuff and Doge and all the rest of it is, you know what, you're just tinkering.

If you don't get rid of or you don't do something to stem the flow of money into Social Security, which is the pension system, Medicaid which we mentioned for poorer and disabled Americans, and Medicare for older Americans, and indeed the payments on debt interest, which also are absolutely massive. If you don't go for those big ticket items, you're just tinkering. It's nonsense. And I wonder whether that becomes an issue as well if this happens and they say we've saved X amount of money and you begin to have people saying, hang on a second, that's teeny. Is it all this fuss for that we ought to be saving much larger amounts of money, which, of course, Donald Trump doesn't want to do. And as explicitly said, he won't do.

Yeah, Donald Trump doesn't care about the debt. You probably remember there's a bus stop not far from our office in Washington which has an LED display of what the level of the national debt is. It's still there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The trillions, I think. And it takes over all the time. As you're standing waiting for the bus, you can see the debt going up and up and up. Donald Trump does not care about that. And he wants to renew, for instance, his tax cuts. That's coming up before Congress, Congress very soon, which will add further to the debt. But that's not a concern of his whatsoever.

I mean, Elon Musk has said he's going to reduce by about a third the federal government spending. That's impossible. Without, as you say, dismantling Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and looking at the Defense Department budget, which is the other thing that they do not want to do. Isn't there a problem also for Donald Trump, though, that one of the narratives that he built his entire election campaign on was this idea of, you know, the kind of elite elites are not sticking up for you and I am, and I'm going to represent you. And, you know, there's these kind of unelected bureaucrats who have too much will, too much power in our country.

And then he's got Elon Musk, who's unelected, seeming quite powerful. He's a bureaucrat slayer. True. Exactly. But you could see how if you were the Democrats and you were thinking about how to go about attacking Donald Trump, you'd say, well, hang on a second. This very rich man is kind of maybe doing lots of things. Trump, though, did it? No, exactly.

It doesn't. And it's just quite interesting. Like how. How do they go about dealing with Elon Musk? Lots of people feel kind of inherently quite uncomfortable with this idea of someone from the outside who maybe doesn't understand how it works, kind of coming in and saying, you know, they're all up for politicians they feel represent them, but they're not so sure about this unelected rich guy who owns a social media company thing. And you wonder how much Americans like, at the moment. I think that's more of a British thing. Is that just a British thing, do you think? I think.

I think Americans comfortable with wealthy, they tend to think, isn't this right, Sarah? They're intensely relaxed about. Tensely relaxed, yes. To use the words Once spoken by the new British ambassador to Washington who's just arrived, Peter Mandelson. But yeah, they are really genuinely intensely relaxed and they sort of think that with wealth comes a certain set of rights almost that to, to, to, to spend. I remember Obama. Do you remember this, Sarah Obama saying at one stage, you didn't build this. So he was talking about people who said, we're self made Americans and we did everything.

And he was just making the point that there is an infrastructure of stuff from a legal system to working water, et cetera, et cetera, that you didn't build. Actually you've used it and well done to you, but you didn't build it all yourself. And it never really worked politically for him. In fact, rather the opposite. I just wonder whether you sort of stumbled, Mariana, on a difference, another difference between us and them, as it were.

Yeah. People, if you have built a company or companies like Elon Musk has and made a huge amount of money doing it, that is a badge of success and that earns you the right to bring the same ethos into government. Because who wouldn't want the federal government to be run every bit as efficiently as Tesla or SpaceX is being run? And all the time people say when they were deciding who to vote for, look, you know, Donald Trump, Bill is a successful businessman. We need him running the business of America. That was one of the arguments I heard most frequently.

I mean, as brought up as often as immigration was, you know, we need a businessman in the White House who knows how to run the economy. He built up his own successful company and now he can do the same for America. Yeah. There's a very perceptive question has come in from one of our amerikasters, David, who asks if there are parallels to be drawn between the events of January 6th 6, 2021 and the current activities of Elon Musk. He says government buildings are being possibly unlawfully accessed in an attempt to thwart the will of Congress, all with the tacit approval of President Trump.

That's, that's a canny observation that. Yeah. So is this the biggest flexing of muscle by an individual in American. Probably not in American history. Because you think back to the oil moguls of the early part of the 20th century. I mean, there was a saying, wasn't there? I'm trying to remember exactly what it was about John D. Rockefeller, the oil mogul, that in Pennsylvania, where I suppose he was extracting a lot of oil, the only thing he hadn't managed to refine was the legislature. But he tried to refine them too, or words to that effect.

In other words, he really did control a lot of politics. And we have had in the past, albeit the quite distant past, hasn't really been like this for some decades, but in American history, it's true to say that very wealthy people have had a lot of influence, to put it mildly. They have. But interestingly, I started reading just in the last week or so a little bit more about the, the famous Gilded Age, because having watched all of those tech oligarchs sitting at the inauguration in their very, very prominent seats, I wondered what the parallels were back to all those famous names of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and whatnot, who, you know, the, the famous robber barons of the early part of the 20th century.

And from what I could make out, they didn't have anything like the influence that Elon Musk or some of these other people do that they, you know, the biggest scandal was around the brother in law of a vice president and whether or not he had been unlawfully persuaded to do something. I mean, this idea that being inside the White House, even as close as Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos is, is closer than any of these rubber band. And you could also say eventually they were broken up. I mean, the great kind of cartels, including the oil ones, were bussed by government.

So maybe that's right. And they're not as powerful as Elon Musk. And David's point, I think it's very good as well. It's not just this unelected official doing this, thwarting the will of Congress. This is part of the power grab that's going on by the executive branch. And no longer do we have the careful balance of power between the legislature and the executive.

Because Donald Trump, Trump's, you know, he is rampaging through government, doing whatever he wants without any legislation being passed to allow it. And he doesn't really care whether it's unconstitutional or not. He just thinks that he can run everything from the White House and use Elon Musk to do a lot of it. I mean, it's an amazing fact, isn't it, that there is at least one sort of reasonable interpretation of the Constitution that used to be the kind of conservative one, which is that there are three separate branches of government, but the Congress, one of those branches actually mandates stuff that is done and sorts out the money side of doing it.

And it's the President's job really just to, well, to execute, to do it as the executive, just to do what Congress has decided to do. We live in a really different space now, don't we? And America does. And, you know, the Constitution has evolved, but it's evolved in a way that I suspect a lot of, kind of constitutional scholars, certainly of yesteryear, would not have, have understood really to be proper American government.

Yeah. Previous presidents cared very much about not only staying on the right side of the Constitution, but being seen to do so. And Donald Trump doesn't care about that either. He's very, very happy to test the boundaries of it and accumulate as much power as he possibly can. And things like the potential conflict of interest of somebody like Elon Musk, who has billions of dollars of government contracts going to the companies that he runs. Is anybody worried about that?

I mean, Donald Trump says, oh, well, if Elon comes across something that he sort of shouldn't be dealing with because he's got business in that area, he will recuse himself. So we don't need to worry about that. Fine. Yeah, let's not worry about it then. Yeah. I heard the journalist, the New York Times journalist, Ezra Klein, saying the other day that one of the things that surprised him, I thought it was such an interesting point, was that we've all met congresspeople.

Look, we all know politicians in Western democracies. They tend to have quite a strong sense of their own importance. And it seems weird, Ezra Klein was saying that somehow members, particularly the House of Representatives, where all the money decisions are meant to come, have suddenly just decided that on the Republican side, they are nothing more than ciphers for a president, essentially. So they've got all this sense of, of their own self importance when they come to Washington, where is it?

Why aren't they standing up to him? Why aren't they, you know, saying to Elon Musk, come on, we've got to, we've got to come to a public hearing. We're going to question you at the very least about everything that you're doing. What's happened to that branch of government? Do you not think that? Part of it, and this is me speculating, but part of it is the fear of what Elon Musk will do when you go for him, which is if you try and argue with him, even in a really valid way, and Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom of expression, you become a target for him on X.

There's a huge army of people who, you know, that's not to say Elon Musk will abuse you necessarily, but, you know, he might reshare stuff that other people will then target you with abuse. Some of this stuff has huge implications for people like security, safety. They no longer feel like, you know, that. They feel like they're at risk of something bad happening, being attacked. And it really stifles the ability to criticize Elon Musk. It's an incredibly powerful weapon, which kind of seems mad because.

Because Twitter X is not that big, but it still just has this huge impact on public conversation. And after everything that happened around the election, and I think the feeling that Elon Musk managed to create a conversation around Donald Trump very effectively on that small platform, and then it sort of spread everywhere else, you can see why, if you're either worried about your reputation or your safety or any of that, you think, I'm just going to stay out of this. I say that as a. As a reporter who investigates X, and I will only choose to, for example, tweet Elon Musk, ask to ask him to do an interview on a day when I know I can cope with a kind of barrage of.

I mean, I can cope all the time with a badge of abuse and debts. But, you know, I mean, like a day. A day, Yeah, a day when you. You sort of anticipate it because, you know, that is the case. And so you can imagine what that's like for people who are. Who are politicians thinking, oh, well, every two years you might face a primary that's. That's well funded. Well, that's. That's it.

It's. The threat of a primary challenge is what has. Has got representatives both in the House and in the Senate in line behind Donald Trump, because what he threatens you with, no matter how safe your seat might be with all the Republicans there, he threatens you with a primary challenge to somebody who is to the right of you, somebody who's even Trumpier than you, will challenge you in a primary before your next election. And what has happened is that Elon Musk has used his platform on X to, to threaten that, to make that clear, to get, you know, an army of supporters saying, we will. We will challenge you.

We will unseat you. And that's how, for instance, every single one of his controversial cabinet nominees has sailed through their congressional hearings and votes that. That have happened in the Senate. And, yeah, using Elon Musk to amplify the threat of a primary challenge is what's. What's kept Republican. But what Mariana's saying seems to me is that social media is undermining potentially the American Constitution and the way it's meant to work. I mean, these Things are not much discussed except in this podcast and other places where people are interested in the workings of the US government. But they are massively, fundamentally important because we may.

Well, we're all concerned about social media at the moment. I was going to say somebody should do a podcast about the dangers of social media. Well, you know, but we focus on, quite rightly, on the harms done to kids potentially and all the other stuff that people talk about. I'm not sure we do focus enough on what social media has done to our politics, actually, anywhere. But with regard to America, it's really salient, isn't it?

Well, this is a kind of a wider conversation that people are having more generally about, if you think about how democracy as we know it works, it kind of relies on everybody buying into the way it works in a certain way. And it can be a bit slow and a bit boring and a bit heavy and a bit. But it kind of has relied on all of those things to function in the way that it does. And social media has kind of put like, sort of thrown a bomb in because it's like, actually it's emotional, it's reactive respect for the process. Yeah. And Elon Musk is in some way, ways sort of emblematic of that.

And we're seeing that play out in real time. And, you know, it can feel quite dramatic sometimes when people ask, like, is democracy going to die? Is it the end of democracy? And you think of. To come back, actually to this really good question from David. If you think of January 6th, that was one of the questions people were saying, like, does American democracy die? And interestingly, it's that act of, you know, the violence that unfolded in the Capitol that day feels in some ways less significant, obviously significant to the people who were harmed or subsequently lost their lives.

But it feels less significant in this context than, for example, what Elon Musk is doing, which is actually about, like, fundamental changes to how, like you say, how the kind of system works and what works and what doesn't work. And what does that mean for the long term? Well, it could, like, completely change what people expect of government, basically.

That's it for today. If you want to listen to more Americas, you can find them on BBC Sounds. See you later. Bye.

POLITICS, INNOVATION, LEADERSHIP, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, ELON MUSK, ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM, BBC NEWS