Jeffries declines to embrace Musk amid the billionaire's feud with Trump

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is keeping his distance from Elon Musk even after the billionaire’s extraordinary public rebuke of President Trump and the GOP’s domestic agenda. 

Asked Friday if Musk’s bitter break from Trump presents Democrats with an opportunity to form a strange-bedfellows alliance with the tech titan, Jeffries shifted the conversation immediately to the Democrats’ efforts to kill Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” 

“The opportunity that exists right now is to kill the GOP tax scam,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol. “It's legislation that we have been strongly opposed to, and uniformly opposed to, from the very beginning. ... It rips health care away from millions of people. It snatches food out of the mouths of hungry children. And it rewards billionaires and [GOP] donors in ways that are fiscally irresponsible.”

Pressed on whether Musk should be “welcomed back” to the Democratic Party after the high-profile split from Trump, Jeffries punted again. 

“Same answer,” he said. 

Jeffries's cautious remarks demonstrate the limits of the old adage that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend. They also highlight the potential difficulties Democrats would face if they embraced a polarizing and nationally unpopular figure in Musk — one they’ve spent most of the last year bashing for heavy spending on Trump’s campaign and, more recently, for his role in heading Trump’s efforts to gut the federal government. 

Still, some Democrats say Musk’s influence is significant enough that Democrats should make the effort to try to court him to their side amid the Trump feud. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents parts of Silicon Valley, is leading the charge. 

“If Biden had a big supporter criticize him, Trump would have hugged him the next day,” Khanna posted Thursday on social platform X, which is owned by Musk. “When we refused to meet with @RobertKennedyJr, Trump embraced him & won. We can be the party of sanctimonious lectures, or the party of FDR that knows how to win & build a progressive majority,” referring to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Jeffries isn’t going nearly so far. But he has welcomed Musk’s attacks on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and the Republicans who voted for it. And he aligned Democrats with Musk’s sentiments that the package piles too much money onto the federal debt, a figure the Congressional Budget Office estimated to be $2.4 trillion. 

“To the extent that Elon Musk has made the same point that everyone who has voted for this bill up until this moment should be ashamed of themselves, we agree,” Jeffries said. “And to the extent that Elon Musk has made the point that the bill is a ‘disgusting abomination,’ we agree. And to the extent that Elon Musk has made the observation about the GOP tax scam — that it is reckless and irresponsible to explode the deficit by more than $3 trillion, and that potentially could set our country on a path toward bankruptcy — we agree.”

“These are arguments that Democrats have been making now for months.”