Mike Johnson has spent his 19 months as speaker forging a close relationship with President Donald Trump — in part to avoid the social-media bombshells that derailed so many Republican priorities during Trump’s first term.

Now he has to deal with another, perhaps even more unpredictable online bomb-thrower.

Elon Musk’s decision to launch a sudden scorched-earth campaign against the GOP’s domestic-policy megabill has forced Johnson into a sudden scramble to save the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda.

Starting in the moments Tuesday after Musk first called the bill a “disgusting abomination” through the tech mogul’s open breach Thursday with Trump, the speaker has mounted a multi-front rebuttal to the criticism — aiming to keep the backlash from spinning out of control.

That has included questioning Musk’s personal motives for opposing the bill, challenging Musk’s claims (backed up by independent scorekeepers) about the bill’s fiscal impact, promising other legislative actions that will address Musk’s concerns and otherwise questioning the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s understanding of the legislative process.

“Look, I’m a fiscal hawk myself,” an exasperated Johnson told reporters Wednesday evening. “If I could cut $8 trillion in federal spending today, I would do it, but I do not have the votes for that. So, this is a deliberative body. It requires consensus. It took us over a year to reach the consensus, to get 217 votes necessary to make the cuts that we have.”

He described a “multiple step process” for securing conservative wins that includes the spending “rescissions” Republicans are now pursuing, as well the upcoming fiscal 2026 appropriations process and the prospect of “another reconciliation package” in addition to the megabill.

“There may be a third one,” Johnson floated, adding that “we have to do it in the proper sequence.”

It remains unclear just how effective Musk’s attacks will be with Republican lawmakers — especially after he openly attacked Trump, suggesting without evidence the president was implicated in wrongdoing with the late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Most in the GOP enthusiastically embraced the charismatic automaker and rocketeer as he fully aligned himself last year with Trump and the GOP, and they cheered on his chaotic bureaucracy-slashing efforts in the White House.

But they also see Trump, not Musk, as their political lodestar and so far there is no sign the president is wavering on the legislation, even after Musk told his 220 million followers on X Wednesday to call their representatives and “KILL the BILL.”

Top House leaders have publicly and privately emphasized Trump’s ongoing support for the bill. Johnson said at a Wednesday news conference that Trump is “not delighted that Elon did a 180” on the legislation.

Asked about the possibility of Musk targeting House incumbents who vote for the legislation, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise pivoted to Trump’s role as “our best, most effective deliverer of support.”

GOP leaders and White House officials have also called in backup from online conservative influencers to publicly back the bill on X and other platforms amid Musk’s all-out assault, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the private conversations.

Johnson, for instance, shared a list of “50 MAJOR wins from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that the media is ignoring” from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on his official speaker X account alongside endorsements from top Trump aide Stephen Miller and several of his own members.

The speaker has also been willing to suggest that Musk’s criticisms aren’t entirely based in conservative principle — he noted to reporters on multiple occasions that Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle firm, would be negatively affected by the termination of clean-energy tax credits in the megabill.

“I know that has an effect on his business and I lament that,” he said Tuesday, later adding in a Bloomberg TV interview Wednesday that the tax credits were “important to the leader of Tesla.”

Musk on Thursday took direct aim at Johnson, suggesting the speaker had betrayed his past views on deficit spending by pushing the megabill forward — to which Johnson responded: “The Mike Johnson of 2023 is the SAME Mike Johnson who has always been a lifelong fiscal hawk – who now serves as Speaker and is implementing a multi-stage plan to get our country back to fiscal responsibility and extraordinary economic growth.”

The main risk for Johnson right now is that Musk’s attacks could buoy fiscal hard-liners at a critical moment for the legislation, with the Senate poised to make significant changes that could reduce the size of the spending cuts in the House passed bill. The bill will then have to come back to the House for final passage, and Musk is only emboldening potential holdouts.

One such House hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said Musk’s broadsides “wouldn’t have hurt our case about two to three weeks ago.”

Perhaps even more worrying for Republicans: Musk’s critique of the bill’s fiscal impact — adding $2.4 trillion in deficits according to a new Congressional Budget Office analysis — is opening up a new line of attack on their incumbents as they work to sell the bill to the public ahead of the 2026 midterms. They’re already under heavy fire from Democrats, who are training attack ads on the GOP’s planned Medicaid cuts.

“I don’t think he’s killing the bill,” said one House GOP lawmaker. “I’m more worried he’s killing our sales pitch.”

Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who leads the House GOP campaign arm, dismissed Musk’s threats in a brief interview Wednesday evening: “He’s been a friend and he’s just wrong about this bill,” he said. “I think long term, this is nothing.”

But privately, wary GOP incumbents are noting that Musk isn’t just another scorned administration official or outspoken MAGA Republican: He poured more than $250 million into the 2024 elections to help Trump and congressional Republicans take power. His veiled threats to target Republicans in the midterms are deeply worrying to members who can’t afford to fend off Musk’s intervention in their races — or might have been hoping he’d write them a check.

For some House Republicans, however, the public break with Musk comes as a welcome development. Many have been irritated that Musk would not take responsibility for some of the chaos his slash-and-burn operation had unleashed in their districts — with some left stunned after Musk told them in a closed-door meeting back in March that his DOGE operation “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”

Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) called Musk “a brilliant businessman” but lamented that the billionaire isn’t likely to change his mind about the bill — which Gimenez described as a first step in slashing government spending.

“This is a process, and he’s an impatient person,” Gimenez said. “You have to be more patient than that.”

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump publicly chastised Elon Musk — his onetime adviser and a major political benefactor — on Thursday, amid the Tesla CEO’s continued attempts to take down the cornerstone of Republicans’ legislative agenda.

Responding to a question about Musk’s posts during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the White House, Trump said he was “surprised” and “disappointed” by Musk’s attacks.

“Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump told reporters. “I don’t know if we will anymore.” He later said he was “very disappointed in Elon” and that “I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

The comments are Trump’s first public response to Musk’s attempts to take down his marquee legislation — and the biggest crack yet in a growing feud between the president and the world’s wealthiest man. After shattering fundraising records to sweep Trump into the White House, Musk was tapped to lead the Department of Government Efficiency and given broad authority — with little oversight — to slash his way through the federal bureaucracy.

On Friday, the day Musk’s “special government employee” status was set to expire, Musk and Trump appeared in the Oval Office together, thanking each other for their work over the course of a friendly, nearly hourlong news conference.

Less than a week later, that relationship appears to have soured.

“He hasn’t said [anything] bad about me personally, but I’m sure that will be next,” the president said on Thursday.

Sure enough, minutes later, Musk said on X: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

“Such ingratitude,” Musk added. He donated nearly $300 million in the 2024 election.

Musk has been on a three-day rampage against Republicans’ reconciliation package in Congress. Earlier on Thursday, he needled Trump directly for the first time — resurfacing old social media posts in which Trump said he was “embarrassed” by Republican efforts to extend the debt limit.

Musk shared the posts on X, which he owns, adding his own facetious approval.

“I cannot believe the Republicans are extending the debt ceiling—I am a Republican & I am embarrassed!,” Trump wrote in the January 2013 post.

“Wise words,” Musk replied in a post on Thursday.

Musk also replied to a Trump post from 2012 in which he said members of Congress should not be eligible for reelection if the U.S. doesn’t have a balanced budget.

“I couldn’t agree more!,” Musk wrote.

Trump in the Oval Office claimed Musk had known “the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody” and “he had no problem with it.” That changed, Trump said, once Musk left the government last week. He lumped Musk into a cadre of other former White House aides who have gone on to sharply criticize him, calling it an example of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump said Musk had been “disturbed” by a part of the over-1,000-page legislation that would cut subsidies for electric vehicles, which would undermine Musk’s company, Tesla. He also suggested Musk had been disappointed when Trump last week pulled the nomination for Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. Musk had recommended Isaacman for the role, but Trump said he had decided to select someone else because Isaacman “happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat.”

“Suddenly he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out we’re going to cut the EV mandate that’s billions and billions of dollars,” Trump said.

Musk quickly brushed aside Trump’s comments at the White House and urged Republicans to scale down the bill’s scope. He also denied Trump’s claim that he knew the “inner workings” of the bill, writing in yet another post that the bill “was never shown to me even once.”

“Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote.

Musk’s attacks began on Tuesday when he called the bill a “disgusting abomination” in a post on X. Since then, he’s posted dozens of times chastising the bill for increasing spending and for raising the debt ceiling. In multiple posts, he’s suggested the bill would push the U.S. into “debt slavery.”

But the post on Thursday using Trump’s own words to accentuate his argument escalates the growing tension between the president and the world’s richest man, who was a staunch Trump ally up until this week. Musk shattered records helping Trump and congressional Republicans get elected in 2024, and had spent big in an ultimately unsuccessful effort in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year.

But last month, Musk said he would step back from political spending. This week, he suggested he may no longer contribute to politicians who support the bill.

Musk’s attacks come as Senate Republicans work to corral enough support in their ranks to approve the bill.

On Wednesday, Trump called for the debt ceiling to be “entirely scrapped” to prevent an economic “catastrophe,” and praised Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for floating a similar proposal.

Senate Republicans are eyeing possible Medicare provisions to help offset the cost of their megabill as they try to appease budget hawks who want more spending cuts embedded in the legislation.

Making changes to Medicare, the federal health insurance program primarily serving seniors, would be a political longshot: It would face fierce backlash from some corners of the Senate GOP, not to mention across the Capitol, where Medicare proposals were floated but didn’t gain traction.

But Senate Republicans are now seriously considering it as they race to pass their party-line tax and spending package before a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The idea came up in closed-door meetings this week and, crucially, some Republicans believe President Donald Trump is on board with touching the program as long as it’s limited to “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“I think anything that is waste, fraud and abuse are obviously open to discussions,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Thursday when asked about Medicare.

Cracking down on some smaller areas of the vast program could net significant savings for Senate Republicans. The other main area they’re planning to tap is ratcheting down the House-negotiated state-and-local-tax-deduction cap – as Thune first acknowledged to POLITICO Tuesday. Both are politically explosive areas that will trigger serious blowback in the House.

“I think the focus, as you know, has been on addressing waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid,” Thune added when pressed on Medicare. “But right now we’re open to suggestions if people have them about other areas where there is clearly waste, fraud and abuse that can be rooted out in any government program.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was among the Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee who went to the White House Wednesday to meet with Trump about the tax portion of their megabill, told reporters he believed the president was more amenable to making Medicare changes than he might have previously let on.

“I think the president is actually open to any elimination of any waste, fraud and abuse … wherever,” he said, though added that Trump “doesn’t want to cut benefits.”

Finance Committee Republicans wanted to use their audience with Trump to press their case for making certain business tax incentives permanent, but a significant chunk of the conversation instead focused on senators pitching their individual ideas for how to inject more savings into their version of the House-passed bill.

A band of House moderates is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of touching Medicare in the megabill, even if it is in the name of “waste, fraud and abuse.” Speaker Mike Johnson said in a brief interview Thursday that he wouldn’t “address hypotheticals.”

But he reiterated he doesn’t want to inject any more major political fights into the already fractious talks. Johnson said the House GOP’s “work reflects more than a year of very careful and deliberate discussion and ideas and so, you know, we’re very satisfied with the product we’ve sent over there, and I hope they’ll change it as little as possible.”

Some House lawmakers briefly floated the idea of overhauling Medicare Advantage — which enables older Americans to buy private plans offering health coverage — to garner savings. Critics have accused Medicare Advantage plans of using financial gamesmanship to increase federal payments, but targeting the program would likely draw the ire of the insurance industry.

The search for more cuts comes as GOP senators look for areas where they can go beyond the House’s $1.6 trillion in cuts. But the push is being complicated because some Senate committees, including the Agriculture panel, are likely to scale back the savings found by their House counterparts.

Leadership is pushing the Agriculture Committee to net $150 billion in cuts as they work to scale down a controversial House plan to shift billions in food aid costs to states, according to four Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. That’s half of the $300 billion in agriculture cuts from the House bill, and GOP senators are still trying to fit in a $70 billion farm bill package.

As part of an effort to generate more savings, Republicans have floated several ideas related to Medicaid, including tightening the House’s work requirements and trying to roll back — not just freeze — the use of state provider taxes. Both of those ideas would face their own block of opposition within the Senate GOP.

But they also raised Medicare as part of a lengthy debate Senate Republicans had among themselves Wednesday, when they met first with CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and subsequently got briefed by the chairs of the Armed Services, Banking and Commerce Committees on their pieces of the megabill.

“There was legitimate debate about: Can we do more with Medicaid? Are we doing too much with Medicaid? How much waste, fraud, abuse is there in Medicare — why don’t we go after that? I think we should,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said about the discussion Wednesday.

Asked if there was any consideration of including Medicare as part of the megabill, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, “There is on the Senate Republican side.”