Question Time today, held in Basingstoke, featured a discussion about Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and how their combination will affect the situation in Ukraine and the economy
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s decisions this week left Green Party MP Ellie Chowns “open-mouthed”.
Speaking on Question Time on Thursday night, the MP for North Herefordshire blasted the new combination in the US, formed after Mr Trump, 78, appointed Musk to a White House cabinet role. Mr Trump described the position as “The Manhattan Project” of our time.
The Manhattan Project was a research and development programme, led by the US in collaboration with the UK and Canada during World War II, to produce the first nuclear weapons. Mr Trump’s comparison has divided opinion across the globe – and Ms Chowns, 49, expressed her concern at the move.
She told the BBC programme: “I’ve been left open-mouthed by them this week… We’ve really got reason to be worried about this move in America and particularly because these are really serious times, so we need serious people at the top at the most powerful country in the world.”
Ms Chowns, making her first appearance on Question Time, also told the audience in Basingstoke, Hampshire she is anxious about how the Trump-Musk combination will affect the situation in Ukraine.
“Ultimately any conflict has to come to a negotiated settlement in the end, but you’ve got to negotiate from a position of strength, and if we have Trump saying basically ‘I’m happy to pull the rug out from underneath Ukraine,’ that’s a complete betrayal essentially,” the animated politician, one of four Green Party MPs in power, added.
“So I am genuinely worried about the direction of Trump and I think it is all the more important then that we do strengthen our relationship with our European partners, and that we stand up for our values as well and definitely not roll over in front of what could be quite a loose cannon America in the coming few years.”
Mr Trump and Mr Musk’s friendship comes just two years after tech mogul Mr Musk, 53, criticised the politician. In 2022, Mr Musk has tweeted: “Time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset,” adding he believed that the “legal maximum age for [the] start of Presidential term should be 69”.
But Mr Trump overcame Kamela Harris’s Democrats easily earlier this month to seal a return to government. The media personality has already been ringing the changes, nominated Robert Francis Kennedy Jr, 70, to lead the Department of Heath and Human Services in his second White House administration.
