Pizzagate for Trump 2.0
Why Elon Musk’s 20-something vandals aren’t tagging federal buildings the way male dogs mark trees is a mystery. A major goal of the DOGE effort is to publicly demonstrate who’s in charge.
Donald Trump still thinks he is.
“It’s good to be the king,” said Mel Brooks as the king of France in History of the World, Part 1. Donald Trump thinks so too. He pretended to be a successful business tycoon on TV. Now he’s pretending to be king. As powerful as Trump’s job is, he’s still just the president.
The question is for how long? Trump has conferred on oligarch Elon Musk authorities the presidency does not have. Plus, Trump has been too busy playing king to have figured out he’s empowered Musk to usurp the presidency while he’s out ransacking Washington, D.C.
It is clear that the Muskovites are bludgeoning anything and everything they perceive as left of center. It is also clear that they have little idea how government actually works and no regard for rule-following. They approach their federal targets with the kind of conspiracy mindset that spawned Pizzagate. (They’ll be searching sub-basements for evidence of child sacrifice soon enough.)
Musk’s behavior recalls another character who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know:
“America is the greatest country ever invented to be completely out of your mind,” Charlie Pierce wrote in 2015. Pierce was reacting to Ben Carson’s crank theories about the pyramids.
When Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?” was a best-seller (speaking of pyramids), Johnny Carson asked a NASA astronaut what he thought of von Daniken’s theories about aliens influencing human history. After a pause, the astronaut replied that when von Daniken looks around the world and sees something he doesn’t understand, he attributes it to aliens. And since there’s a lot in this world von Daniken doesn’t understand, he finds them everywhere.
Elon Musk is as childlike and tantrum-prone as the president he just purchased. So Muskovites are slashing and burning with abandon everything they don’t understand, especially anything that smells like order.
Subtlety is not something they grasp. Like USAID as a projection of U.S. soft power.
The Washington Post explains what the strength-obsessed Trump and his Muskovites do not seem to grasp about their freezing U.S. foreign aid:
Without U.S. support, humanitarian experts warn that already precarious global aid efforts could collapse, putting millions of lives at risk. Some former government officials said the sudden changes would undercut U.S. foreign policy and national security.
“We are not only less safe, but we have abandoned people all over the world,” said Brittany Brown, a former USAID official.
On Wednesday, Trump’s former USAID counselor Chris Mulligan condemned the funding pause. “Every minute that assistance is frozen weakens America, makes us less secure and costs us jobs,” he said.
U.S. foreign aid builds relationships. stems famines (that drive migration?), feeds red-state farm families by paying them for food sent as aid, and keeps competitor states at bay, etc. Not that the Muskovites stopped to ask.
