Mike Johnson texts with Elon Musk about the shutdown. It’s a bad sign.

One Sunday in March 1888, former President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary“This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.” Hayes offered this private admission at the peak of the Gilded Age, when, as the historian Richard White put it, “corruption permeated the government and the economy.” Businessmen amassed fortunes never seen before in American history and demanded that government officials help them expand those fortunes further.

If there was any doubt that we’re in a new Gilded Age, Speaker Mike Johnson’s admission to Fox News on Wednesday erased it.

Johnson appeared on “Fox and Friends” the morning after the Congress leaders released full text of an agreement to keep the federal government running until mid-March. As my colleague Hayes Brown explained Tuesday, Congress must pass a funding bill this week to avoid “a downright unfortunate shutdown.” On the one hand, most House Republicans do not want to vote for a bill that Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden will accept. But they also don’t want to be blamed for a government shutdown. To correct this cycle, Johnson planned to count on Democratic votes to speed up the bill’s passage by a two-thirds majority, allowing a large portion of his caucus to oppose the deal without consequence.

After playing a gathering of GOP representatives complaining about the bill, “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy asked Speaker Johnson about Elon Musk’s post a few hours before it. “This bill should not pass.”

“If you could,” Doocy asked, “what’s your message to Elon Musk?”

“I communicated with Elon last night,” Johnson revealed. “Elon, Vivek (Ramaswamy) and I were in a text chain together and I explained to them the background of this.”

In other words, with the federal government days into a partial shutdown, the second person in the line of presidential succession is spending his time tending the egos of two rich businessmen.

Johnson did not even consult Musk and Ramaswamy about areas where they might have expertise. He explained to these men very basic facts about how the House of Representatives works. “Remember, guys, we still only have a razor-thin margin of Republicans,” Johnson says he told the two men. “So any bill has to have the Democrats’ votes.”

The speaker’s attempts at reassurance were unsuccessful. Like Musk, Ramaswamy has maintained its resistance despite Johnson’s efforts. Nor does Musk appear to have heeded the lesson in the fundamentals of Congress: He wrote X that any congressman or senator “who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Remember that only a third of the Senate is up for election in 2026.

The problem here goes far deeper than the rich mistaking wealth for expertise – any sports fan can, for example. name a dozen team owners who show it fails to the world every year. However, these two men have been assigned an advisory commission on public expenditure. Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut trillions from the federal budget — reductions as big as their grip on governance is tenuous. And that’s before you include Musk’s web of conflicts of interest with various public authorities. In a vacuum their positions would be harmless, but their influence makes them disastrous.

Late Wednesday, Musk’s influence was confirmed when President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance issued a statement echoed by him. They criticized congressional Republicans for “letting our country hit the debt ceiling in 2025” and calling for “a streamlined spending bill” that increases the debt ceiling but “doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want,” such as “boyfriends to government censors and to Liz Cheney.” Will Musk and Ramaswamy be the architects of this “streamlined” bill?

For decades, the influence of money in politics has grown alongside the nation’s rising income inequality. Those who warned of this growing influence have been thoroughly vindicated. This year, Trump’s campaign was fueled by about $800 million from seven billionaire families. His administration will include more than a dozen billionaires, the richest since President Warren Harding’s corrupt White House.

To end the first Gilded Age, Hayes realized that massive reforms were needed. “The real difficulty is the enormous wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital,” he wrote. “Hundreds of laws in Congress and state legislatures are in the interests of these men and against the interests of the workers. These must be exposed and repealed. All laws of corporations, of taxation, of trusts, wills, descent, and the like, must be comprehensively examined and amended.”

Ending the second Gilded Age will require the same kind of sweeping means.