Just hours after Donald Trump won the election, Elon Musk was already flexing his power over the new administration, joining a phone call with the man he helped elect to office and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Axios reported that the world’s richest man made a guest appearance on a phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy on Wednesday, even chiming in at several points during the discussion…
Musk’s surprise addition to the call is a troubling sign, to say the least. Like Trump, the billionaire has a close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. A bombshell report last month revealed that Musk is in regular contact with Putin, and the Kremlin may have even implicitly threatened him. That could explain his past refusal to let Ukraine use his Starlink internet network to carry out a surprise attack on Russian forces, or his public ridicule of Zelenskiy’s requests for aid.
They report that Trump and Musk didn’t tell Zelensky to get ready to capitulate but it’s just a matter of time. Trump has made that very clear and he’s indoctrinated the GOP cult to believe that abandoning Ukraine is the only answer.
It is curious that Trump hasn’t already ended the war, however. He promised over and over again that it would end the day after he was elected (not inaugurated.)
Maybe this has something to do with it:
Bob Woodward shared a warning about Donald Trump in the hours after his election win.
Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the longtime journalist was asked about his thoughts on Trump’s election, having interviewed the president-elect more than 20 times. Woodward mentioned Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I talked a couple of months ago to Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence under Trump, and I said, what’s going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin? And Dan Coats said, ‘It’s almost, it’s so close. It seems like it might be blackmail,’” Woodward said.
“CIA director Bill Burns said Putin manipulates. He’s professionally trained to do that,” Woodward added. “Putin’s got a plan just to do this exactly, and it’s what he did when Trump was in office previously, and he’s planning it again at playing Trump.”
Woodward’s warning came as Putin himself stayed silent on Trump’s victory, waiting until the next day to congratulate the president-elect in what could be a power play for the Russian leader. Putin’s congratulatory message came on Thursday and didn’t include any acknowledgment of Trump’s promise that he could end the Ukraine War in “24 hours,” and perhaps signaled the opposite.
There won’t be any investigation into any of this this time, of course. Even the press will probably be much less motivated to go after these stories. We just have to hope that Trump is too stupid to succeed at his worst plans and that the rest of the world is able to maneuver around him and his strongman buddies enough to keep the world from blowing up.