President-elect Donald Trump pushed back on claims that tech billionaire Elon Musk has been moving in to take his position as president.
“All the different hoaxes and the new one is President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk,” Mr. Trump said Sunday at the Turning Point Action Conference in Phoenix. “No, no, that’s not happening but Elon’s done an amazing job.”
He said Mr. Musk is “not going to be president, that I can tell you.”
“And I’m safe. You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Musk was born in South Africa and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2002. The U.S. Constitution requires that the president be “a natural born Citizen.”
Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy.
However, Democrats have said Mr. Musk seems to be trying to play a role that he doesn’t have.
“Elon has pretty much paid Trump so he could become Co-president of the United States,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, Florida Democrat, wrote on X earlier this month after it was reported that Mr. Musk was on Capitol Hill talking about federal spending.
“We have serious work ahead of us to protect our Democracy by getting billionaire and corporate money out of our politics,” he added.
Mr. Frost wrote Sunday on X that the Mr. Musk as president rhetoric must have “really struck a nerve.”
“Crashing out cause President Elon is the one calling the shots,” he wrote in response to a video of Mr. Trump explaining why Mr. Musk can’t be president at the Turning Point USA event.
Rep. Eric Swalwell wrote in an X post Saturday that “people are saying that Trump is the VP and Elon is the President. But that’s not accurate. Trump is more like Press Secretary.”
“Trump is the mouth. Elon is the muscle,” the California Democrat said.
