Alexander Muse aka (@amuse on 𝕏) is one of the largest political accounts on the American right: half a million followers on 𝕏, a daily op-ed habit spread across (at least) three Substacks, and sources inside the administration, Congress, and the Texas statehouse.
Elon Musk has replied to his posts more than 25 times by PolitiFact’s outraged count, Karoline Leavitt and Donald Trump Jr. are among his followers. Combined, his channels reach around ten million Americans a month.
We caught up in late August to discuss the Texas Senate race and who could be voted off Trump Island next.
This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.
Let’s establish first who you are, and where you sit in Republican politics.
I’ve been on 𝕏 since 2007. In a previous life I was a tech entrepreneur, and in the startup world being a conservative was the kiss of death, so I just didn’t tell anyone where I stood. After January 6 I was banned. Elon bought 𝕏 and restored my account, and I grew it from maybe 200,000 followers to half a million pretty quickly. Now I do 𝕏 full time: daily op-eds, a newsletter I send to GOP donors. And people from the administration, from Congress, from state politics start contacting you. They give you leads, they give you scoops, and you build a bigger and bigger base of sources. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I’m a commentator with opinions on policy, and I try to share them in a format that’s easily consumed by policymakers. One in a hundred pieces I write suddenly makes a difference.
Can you think of a story where you’ve been really ahead of the curve, either from your own sourcing or your political instincts?
The cabinet selection process, between the election and January 20. I had really good sources in the room, and there was a relatively small group of people gaming out who was going to be picked for each role. What shocked me was the political consultants, the people who run the campaigns and the super PACs, and the outsized influence they have on picking who runs the country. I watched consultants torpedoing their own clients.
Why would someone attack their own client?
Say you’re on the short list for Attorney General of the United States, and you’re currently the attorney general of some state. Your consulting firm wants you to run for Senate in the midterms instead, because a consultant makes a huge percentage of the spend on a Senate race. So they go out and say our own client isn’t confirmable, he’s got all these problems. They’ve done the opposition research, so they’re using their own oppo against their own candidate. The sausage is pretty ugly.
Let’s talk Trump approval. What is driving his approval with the base versus with these donors you talk with?
There’s a hard base for Trump he’s never really going to fall below, a could-do-no-wrong group, probably 30 to 35 percent of the GOP. Within his own party he’s more popular than Obama or Biden were at the same point, and your party is most frustrated with you right before the midterms. Among the donor class, he’s never been more popular. The money is flowing in faster than you can count it. On the overall number, you’re lucky if you keep it above 45; 45 is a huge win.
Nate Silver is the resolution source for the Trump approval polymarkets. Do you think Trump’s approval is basically capped on the downside from his hardcore base?
I think so, and nothing can change until the midterms. Iran is not going to do a deal before then; they’re of the opinion the midterms give them the most leverage. But here’s where you could be pricing the market wrong. Say November 6 comes and we don’t lose both chambers. The war ends favorably, the GDP numbers are great, the AI and data center spend keeps going, and his approval could easily go back over 50 by the end of the year, maybe January or February if the Iranians continue to be annoying.
If the Republicans lose the Senate and the House, what do you expect the Democratic Congress to do? They’ll cut off funding?
The War Powers resolutions pass, and there are plenty of Republican votes for them; that becomes a Supreme Court fight dragging into 2027. And almost a certainty: starting in January you have the first impeachment proceedings, then hearings on every single business transaction his children have been involved in, Trump coin, Epstein, every imaginable thing.
Today, Polymarket is showing an 88 % chance for the Dems to win the House, but only 63% that Trump will get impeached before his term ends. If you think it’s basically a lock that he gets impeached if Dems win the House, why isn’t impeachment higher?
It’s underpriced. That should be at least 88. And honestly the 88 is probably too low; it probably needs to be 92. There’s room to be had in both those markets.
Let’s talk about the Senate. You’re very close to the Texas race, which is basically 50-50 today.
The chances of the Republicans holding the Senate are much greater than this market reflects. Take Texas as the microcosm. The polls showing Talarico with a three-to-five-point lead are run by Democrat activists, and the crosstabs are complete BS. Almost assuredly, Ken Paxton is up five points in Texas, and he will win by at least three, maybe four.
And look at your own history. In the primary runoff, the public polling had Cornyn winning or barely losing. Your market had Paxton 62-36 right before he won by 27. The market got it right in a really good way, and the pollsters did not. Ken has never lost a statewide race, he ran against a guy who outspent him ten to one running every scandal on TV all day, and all the bad news about him has been out for years. The market should be at least 75, maybe 80. There’s money being left on the table.
Let’s pull up the Real Clear Politics average. Which of these pollsters are the bullshit ones?
Texas Public Opinion Research (TPOR) is completely fake. Those are literally fundraisers for the Democrats, and it forms the basis for everything else: the Fox poll pulls on it, other pollsters set their conditions on these things. That one huge poll is what flipped the public polling. Ken had been ahead ever since the runoff. I wrote a whole piece for you guys on why that pollster is complete BS.
What the fake polls are doing is oversampling. They’re assuming Republicans are peeling off, Cornyn loyalists staying home. That’s not happening. And they’re not taking into account the Black Democrat vote in Texas, a very religious voting bloc that is not excited about Talarico’s theology, what amounts to a Christianity that doesn’t believe in the Trinity or the basic tenets of the faith. Go watch the town halls in predominantly Black communities: he’s getting shouted down by his own constituents. Some of that may be residual resentment over his defeat of Jasmine Crockett, but it’s also a rejection of his politics. It doesn’t turn them into Republican voters, but it keeps a lot of them home.
Last time we spoke, it was before Tulsi was out, and you’d intimated that more people were heading for the exits. Who will be out before the end of the year?
Trump was reluctant to make changes because of all the turmoil in the first term. The person he was least thrilled with was Pam Bondi. I don’t think she was his choice; that was his chief of staff’s choice after the Matt Gaetz debacle, and he went along with it because he trusts his team. Once the Kristi Noem termination happened, the band-aid had been ripped off, and everyone was up for grabs. From that moment, Pam was in the process of being replaced.
What about Lutnick? What puts him in the higher likelihood to be out group?
Howard Lutnick at 30% is the Epstein stuff; I guarantee it. There are MAGA people calling for his head constantly because of the statements he made about his involvement. But I don’t think that carries with Trump, because Trump knows the truth on all that. And Lutnick is doing a great job. The Intel deal was what, a twenty-billion-dollar check to the Treasury? Free money. Trump’s a dealmaker; he likes that. He’s not going anywhere.
Susie Wiles at 24 percent could be underpriced. She’s struggling with breast cancer right now, and she is actively campaigning for Marco Rubio for the 2028 nomination, which puts her in conflict with the administration and with J.D. Vance. You’ve seen your own market moving from Rubio to Vance; the more you see J.D., the less power Susie has. As she goes through her treatments, it may be a real convenient time for her to move to the next phase of her career.
On Rubio: a lot of us have been shockingly impressed. He’s carried himself with a level of honor and loyalty I did not know he possessed. But he doesn’t agree with a lot of the policies he’s implementing, and the moment he’s in charge, he does things differently.
What about Hegseth? Is he in trouble because of the “running out of missiles” narrative?
Hegseth is one hiccup from being out at any point in time. He’s doing exactly what the president hired him to do, and doing it exceptionally well, but a lot of it can be interpreted really badly by our own side, particularly in the Senate. If it were only Trump’s decision, he’s happy. And the missile-gap reporting is disingenuous: stockpiles are allocated per theater, and the Middle East arsenal being extinguished doesn’t mean we’re out of missiles. They moved stockpiles from Europe; you can watch the cargo flights on FlightAware. Trump was not confused about that.
How do you size up how the U.S. is doing so far in the Iran war?
It depends on what you set the condition of victory to. Militarily, we have basically defeated them. Their entire naval fleet has been destroyed, almost every mobile launcher, and they’re sitting on 10 to 15 percent of their previous drone and missile capability with no ability to construct new ones, because we’ve degraded their manufacturing base. From a capability perspective, this is total victory.
However, the Strait of Hormuz is a threat you’re never going to be able to fix. Say Iran surrendered tomorrow. There’s still some former IRGC commander running around with a speedboat and a shoulder-fired rocket, and he can cut traffic through Hormuz 75 or 80 percent on a weekend, because he hit one ship and everybody stops. What Trump has done, and I think Iran striking its neighbors was a huge miscalculation that made it possible, is bring the whole region under an American security umbrella with a focus on energy. There are twenty-two billion dollars of pipeline projects now to divert 70 percent of the oil around the Strait, underground, in the next 18 to 24 months. U.S. companies are going to make billions making the Strait of Hormuz a non-issue.
Regime change?
We killed the guy in charge, the new guy is just as crazy, and the next one will be just as crazy. If that was the goal, we lost that game.
If you had told me that the Strait of Hormuz was going to be closed for months and asked what the price of oil was going to be, I would not have guessed what the price is right now. Is it demand destruction? Is there secret oil being pumped out somewhere that we don’t know about? Is it just the SPR?
We’re moving a lot of oil. Tankers come through every day; they just turn off their AIS. We’ve seized a lot of oil. We took over the Venezuelan oil market and production there is climbing. And we’re producing a boatload here. Prices are high enough to go get all the oil sitting in the Permian, so every single rig in the national fleet is out right now. The amount of oil we get out of that in the next year is going to be unprecedented.
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Excellent interview and responses! Great ideas for a couple of predictions too! Thank you