Raskin: 'I'm with Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer’ and others saying 'Watch Elon Musk'
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday that the Trump administration needs to keep a close eye on billionaire Elon Musk, a key ally of President Trump — echoing a warning several outspoken far-right advocates have made.
"I’m with Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer and the people on the right who are saying, 'Watch Elon Musk,' because he's the guy who's trying to centralize all power behind him, and he hasn’t been elected to anything,” Raskin said in a Monday interview on MSNBC.
In recent months, Bannon and Loomer have criticized Musk Musk for his support of nonimmigrant H-1B visas, which they argued only help to spur immigration and place a burden on high-skilled American workers. As a response, Loomer said parts of her accounts on Musk's social platform X have been demonetized and unverified.
Amid their argument, Musk has procured access to high level info within the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which he has pushed to shutter, in addition to supporting attempts to dismantle the Education Department.
“I mean, Elon Musk has basically tried to take control of the country’s communications infrastructure, the governmental financial payments infrastructure, the data infrastructure, and he’s got important parts of nodes of the military infrastructure,” Raskin told MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."
“So I’m looking right through Donald Trump, who no doubt wants to abuse everybody’s civil rights and civil liberties and centralize all the power in him," he added.
Democrats have pushed back on the Trump administration through legal battles in court, but those efforts may take months or longer to play out.
Sideliners, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), have urged the party to do more amid threats to democracy and national stability while Trump has adamantly denied claims that Musk has unclenched access to power.
“He’s got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good — if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him,” Trump said Monday from the Oval Office, referring to Musk.
The president added that the Tesla CEO “can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”
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