'Reckless' Elon Musk is 'undermining' Trump: legal analyst

Any hope that Donald Trump may have that the conservative majority Supreme Court will give a thumbs-up to his makeover of the federal government and grant him unlimited power is fading by the day.

That is according to former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori in his column for Politico where he claimed that, as much as Trump can be his own "worst enemy" when it comes to legal matters, Elon Musk is on a whole different level when it comes to creating chaos that has the potential to make a favorable ruling almost impossible.

According to Khardori, Trump's legal strategy appears to breaking the law first and asking for legal cover from the nation's highest court afterward.

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As he put it, "The apparent violations of federal law are a feature, not a bug, of the effort. The Trump administration is expecting legal challenges and hopes that they can change longstanding principles of constitutional law with the assistance of a Supreme Court that is stacked in favor of Republicans after decades of conservative activism and political hardball."

That, he noted, could be derailed by the voluble and brash Musk, who can't seem to keep himself from making bold and outrageous claims on social media and during interviews which will likely be highlighted in opposition filings.

Pointing out that Musk seems to ".. have little understanding of the federal budget, or the government functions and agencies that he has thrown into chaos," the former prosecutor wrote, "his role is not just a potential political problem for the White House; it’s a legal one."

"When Musk speaks, he says false and reckless things. And his claim that he can 'delete entire agencies' should figure prominently in the litigation over Trump’s authority to restructure federal agencies given it directly conflicts with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the line-item veto case," he predicted before adding, "Will the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees all ignore this real-world tumult when the legal challenges reach them?"

"All of this demonstrates the unworkability of the Trump administration’s theories when taken as a whole. There is no question that the volume and intensity of Trump’s efforts to greatly expand his power present the country — and the courts — with a constitutional power grab that has almost no precedent in American history," he explained before suggesting, "Will some Republican appointees on the Supreme Court take note? Trump may have made it impossible for them to ignore."

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