Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say:
“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.
The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.
But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either. I have to believe that he’s appeasing his new best friend, the richest man in the world, but he really does not care about the debt because he knows that he’ll be out of office, possibly dead, if all these worst case scenarios come to pass (which they probably won’t.)
The Muskswamy commission is looking to recommend massive, unprecedented cuts to the entire government including the so-called entitlements. Many GOP members of Congress are excited at the prospect of finally getting that done. Whether that happens with that very tight margin in the House is another story. And there are people in his orbit absolutely determined to fire federal government workers (or force them out some other ways) and they may make some headway but it isn’t quite as easy as they think.
The one thing that gives me hope is Trump’s narcissism preventing him from caring enough to put any of his clout behind this stuff. It’s all about him and these are not his issues.
He wants his tax cuts to be extended and expanded because that puts money in his own pockets. He wants to put on a big deportation show although how extensive that will be is up in the air. He wants to use tariffs to bully and intimidate other countries but he’s too stupid to understand that they have power to do the same thing and it’s going to blow up in his face. If he succeeds in doing all these things the economic consequences will be extreme but I have a sneaking suspicion that his undeniable ability to lie and have people believe him will allow him to not go to the extremes on those issues and just say that he did. (“See, promises made promises kept and everything worked out fine!”) Our completely fragmented and ineffectual information ecosystem will allow him to get away with it.
As for his desire to get revenge on his enemies and profit from the presidency, I think he might just get that done, at least to some extent. Nobody cares about the corruption so he can just write himself checks from the US Treasury or steal the White House silver and get away with it. As for the vengeance agenda, I imagine his administration will do many things to make his enemies pay, from IRS audits to lawsuits to criminal investigations, costing his targets dearly. I don’t know if we will ever reach that “at long last sir, have you no decency” moment because I’m not sure our society is really concerned with decency at the moment.
But in the end, I do believe that his own ignorance, laziness and narcissism may be the tool that saves us. He’ll get his pet issues and steal massive sums of money. But I don’t think there is quite enough bandwidth in this rogues gallery of neo fascists, D-list pols and egomaniacs to get their agenda passed as well. I may very well be wrong, though. It wouldn’t be the first time.