He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Musk Industries
“Calling Musk the ‘shadow president’ may be underselling the severity of the situation,” writes Amanda Marcotte this morning at Salon.
Indeed.
Elon Musk and his youthfoul band of arsonists are gleefully burning every agency in Washington they can force their way into. It’s a hostile takeover of the United States happening in full view of the world. It’s also happening in full view of Democrats down the street just now waking up and smelling the accelerants.
Donald is in the Oval Office sharpie-signing whatever executive orders underlings drafted for him to sign and show off for the cameras like a child’s finger-painting. Donald loves signing things. (Except checks to porn stars.) Does he know what’s in them or is he too far into deepening dementia to care?
But while Donald is busily sharpie-signing, Elon Musk, another overaged adolescent, is running about unsupervised. It seems the White House doesn’t really know what he’s doing with the government Trump was elected to run into the ground.
The New York Times has published an unusually blunt account of Musk’s blitz through executive agencies, including his “efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance.” That move has “reverberated around the globe” (unlocked article):
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”
The rapid moves by Mr. Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.
The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.
Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.
Trump was once the Frankenstein monster running amuck through D.C. But now that he’s loosed Musk on the city, the South African immigrant is stealing his thunder. A fidgety Trump is unable to deploy his signature power moves to reel him back. He’s reduced to explaining him away.
“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”
[…]
Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”
What Trump cannot bring himself to concede (like 2020) is that his presidency is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Musk Industries. Musk has far more money, impossibly more than Trump, a man who measures his manhood by it. James Taylor sang that back when Trump was snowing Times reporters into believing his daddy’s buildings were his own. It’s not often Trump gets up-staged. In spite of holding the presidency, Trump has failed to dominate a man whose stack is so much bigger. And for the richest man in the world, the world is not enough.
President Felonious is not the only one with a mouth agape at the American carnage Musk is wreaking in the nation’s capitol:
There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.
The historian Douglas Brinkley described Mr. Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”
Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.
While officials and electeds wait for someone else to stop him, “Musk is crowdsourcing ideas of what he should unilaterally cut from the absolute worst people on the internet,” Marcotte writes:
The first target of Musk’s illegal campaign to cut programs that Congress has authorized money for is USAID, a program started by President John F. Kennedy that administers foreign aid and development assistance. The program has long been embraced by both parties, with Democrats supporting its charitable aims and Republicans more interested in how it buys goodwill that keeps the U.S. as the top international power. Shutting it down would also undermine Trump’s efforts to reduce immigration from places like Central America, by increasing the poverty and desperation that drives migration. But Musk doesn’t care about the law or the disastrous effects. He’s too busy trying to please his minions on X, especially the ones with nice things to say about Adolph Hitler.
[…]
Musk’s baby-faced boy army is just an especially galling example of how the billionaire believes random know-nothing right-wingers should usurp the authority of elected representatives. Their youth is alarming not because they lack experience — which will thankfully make it harder for them to figure out how to execute Musk’s supervillain-style plans — but because of what it suggests about Musk’s strategy. Young people tend to be more naive and are probably starstruck by their celebrity boss. Such people are easier to lure into committing direct crimes, so they incur legal liability instead of Musk. It’s easy to see how young men, drunk on memeified far-right politics and the cloak-and-dagger excitement of hacking into government offices, might not see how they’re taking serious risks with their futures by playing illegal games.
They won’t. The Musk-Trump administration has eliminated the FBI’s leadership and means to install fangirl Pam Bondi to head what Trump derides as the Department of Injustice. Bondi will redefine “selective enforcement.” Meaning illegal is what Trump says it is now that the Roberts court has effectively indemnified him.
For his part, Musk is living his supervillain dream. All that’s missing is him smugly laying out his evil plan before its denouement. But those Bond set-pieces only occur in the presence of heroes prepared to stop them. So far, heroes are in short supply.