I'm John. That's with my good colleague Elizabeth Peake, writing most recently a column

on Elon Musk's latest genius, which is to form a party called America Party. Gee, where this

idea of third party came from. Liz, what's joyful about Musk is it's beginning to resemble a Russian proverb I learned many

years ago. There's the right way. There's the wrong way. There's the Russian way. So amending it,

there's the right way, the wrong way, and there's Musk's way. Now, he is aiming to pick off a

couple of seats in the Senate and a couple of seats in the House,

maybe not for his own party, but to throw them to the other side.

That is credible, is he could do that.

That is what's worrisome, I think, is that it is credible.

He's got, excuse me, so much money. And as we saw in the latest

election, he's willing to spend it to get the outcome that he wants. And what he's talking about

is seven or eight, nine house seats, a couple of Senate seats. And, you know, John, the politics

of today are so evenly divided in our country that that actually could make a huge difference in terms of policy.

What isn't clear is what would he do with those seats?

In other words, are those candidates going to simply hold out, for example, if they were in place during the negotiation for the big, beautiful bill,

the reconciliation bill that just passed, would they have been the holdouts that demanded more

spending cuts? Because Elon Musk is all about, he says, he's all about the fact that our

debt is too high, our deficits are too high, and we're spending too much

money. And of course, having spent months of his life overseeing Doge, the Department of Government

Efficiency, and try to cut waste and fraud in the federal government, that's something you can

kind of point to and say, yeah, he really does think that. But on the other hand, what he really is,

I think, furious about is that having sacrificed and given so much to the Trump administration

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