X CEO Elon Musk may now be in position to accumulate unprecedented power but historian David Nasaw believes that the clock is ticking on his ability to maintain influence over Trump White House policy.
Writing in the New York Times, Nasaw runs down the history of king-making oligarchs such as William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie who believed that they would be given major decision-making responsibilities in presidential administrations they helped elect, only to be given the cold shoulder in the months after elections.
Nasaw believes that this dynamic will play out even more rapidly under a second Trump White House, where the president-elect's narcissism will simply not allow him to share a spotlight with anyone.
"Mr. Trump may be mercurial, but in this situation he is highly unlikely to break historical precedent," he writes. "I predict that you will probably join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose."
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Nasaw believes that Musk's departure is particularly likely given that he has positioned himself as a prospective budget-cutting tsar whose plans would deliver economic havoc on the country.
"I’m not sure what you were thinking — or if you were thinking — when you clambered on that Madison Square Garden stage and claimed that as chief of the Department of Government Efficiency... you would cut at least $2 trillion of government spending," he writes. "The results of such a gutting would, even conservative think-tank analysts predicted, be catastrophic. It is nearly impossible to imagine a majority of Republican lawmakers endorsing your plans to slash a third of all federal spending. To do so would be political suicide."
Nonetheless, Nasaw predicts Musk's investments in Trump will pay off handsomely for his businesses in the coming years, even if his grand plans to remake American society go up in smoke.