At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama made a joke about the end of the birther controversy, suggesting Donald Trump could “… finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing…?”. It is said that this was the spark that created MAGA. I believe that’s true.
The red hat and the branding came later, but Trump’s humiliation at the hands of a popular Black president, who oozed likability and operated eight years of the Executive Branch with no scandals, was likely too much to take for Trump’s ego-rotted brain.
Trump’s political identity has always been a marketing tool, switching effortlessly between Democrat, Independent, unaffiliated, Republican, and now MAGA. His politics have always been tied to whatever opportunity bests supports him at that moment.
It was clear by the end of his 2017 inauguration speech, when he famously slanders the very country he was then charged to lead with his “… American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” line, that just being a Republican was not enough for Trump; he had to control the brand and the narrative to make sure all points led to him. Every part of America that came before him was a wasteland that only he could fix.
Trump was molded and handcrafted in the same populist factory that produced Jair Bolsonaro, Imran Khan, and Viktor Orbán. His handlers have plied him into the perfect media figure who rallies his army of red hats to attack anything that’s not MAGA. Even Trump’s xenophobic former Vice President Mike Pence isn’t extreme enough for MAGA, and they want to hang him. Trump is idolized by his voting base and derided by almost everyone else.
Around the same time Obama was humiliating Trump, Elon Musk had brazenly “stolen” a car company, was pushing the impossible-to-build Hyperloop, and began to lie about the SpaceX “Mars Colonial Transporter,” and he was brilliantly guiding Tesla through eight years of losses until, finally, in 2020, the company eked out $721 million in profits on the sale of $1.6 billion in climate credits. Musk cannot stop talking sh*t and has no internal moderator.
The emerald edgelord has always been scratching his populist itch, but just a bit, as he was not fully in the MAGA camp yet. Then, Musk attended the anti-Trump summit with other tech moguls on Georgia’s Sea Island in 2016, but claimed to have only talked about Mars stuff. Leading up to the election, there were reports and repudiations of political donations from Musk and his companies to Trump. Elon was never an outright Trump supporter, even directly stating, “[Trump] doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” I have to think at this point Musk liked the message, just not the messenger.
Halfway through Trump’s first term, Elon was pumping Tesla stock with the famous funding secured at $420 tweet, which earned him an SEC monitor, removal as Tesla’s board chairman, and a $12 billion investor lawsuit (which he won in 2023). Similar to the Obama wisecrack, Musk had found his radicalizing spark in the form of government regulators. Musk still must seek regulatory approval for every Tweet about Tesla; otherwise, he faces a $20 million fine for each violation.
Since 2020, Elon has steadily shifted away from his light-touch MAGA support, and in 2023, with bold commitment, he became a Ron DeSantis backer (after first backing Andrew Yang). In the same vein as Trump, Musk needs a cause to lead that only shines light on himself, and he picked the rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bootin’ Florida governor, who has the racist pedigree, but not the hard-core baggage that Trump has. DeSantis is a full-on legit populist, despite his painfully robotic smile and dead eyes, who announced his presidential campaign during an audio broadcast on X in one of the most humiliating public appearances in recent memory.
The DeSantis support stunt was enough for Elon to formally pivot to supporting MAGA without Trump-MAGA. Robot Ron is gone from the Republican primary race, but Elon retains the populist attention. And, oh boy, is he milking that angry cow. (Apologies to Devin Nunes, as required by internet law.) Musk recently appeared in another live audio conversation, this time with an all-star misogynist line-up of Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jack Posebiac, Andrew Tate, and Jackson Hinkle, and 2.2 million other listeners. That was the chef’s kiss. Elon is in and he’s going deep.
Here we now have two tightly aligned populist figures, Trump and Musk, who follow the generally same fascist playbook, but each with their own special flavor additive. They have walked different paths on their journey, but they have arrived simultaneously to wage war against America.
A political war against America comes in many varieties, depending on the viewing perspective. If you believe in MAGA, then migrants are rapists, and Black people are shoplifting the retail sector into bankruptcy. As a center lib, you’re OK with some light genocide as long as the student debt gets canceled. Here on the left, we are still fighting for free education, single-payer healthcare, and constitutional protections for LGBTQ people.
In this war, the battles are different between MAGA and Progressives. Trump and Musk are leading their sycophant armies of supporters towards tearing the fabric of American society into pieces with attacks on the judiciary, migrants, trans people, the poor, and every other group that impedes their path to power. All the while, the ‘globalist’ left wants the government to subsidize the manufacture of solar panels, establish more union labor, reinstate the child tax credit, and stop the murder of schoolchildren through reasonable gun control laws.
MAGA is fighting a war against people, while Progressives are fighting a war for people.
Positioning Musk and Trump as different sides of the same coin is an apt money metaphor. Both overinflate their wealth through self-aggrandizement, with Trump squeezing every dollar by running his businesses like a crime syndicate, and Musk boosting his wealth by pumping Tesla stock with repeated false claims on self-driving, pricing, and model availability.
Life for these guys is a slapstick series of self-own mishaps that are richly comical when compared to their contemporaries in business and politics. I’m not a mogul apologist, but just wow, these guys are awful at what they do, and still, they have enough wealth and power to keep rake-stepping without end.
Musk is currently facing a federal investigation into Tesla’s claim that the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature, a cornerstone aspect of Tesla’s innovation story, is reportedly far from being fully developed. The $44 billion enema that is Twitter is experiencing crippling revenue and user losses, telegraphing that its future is nearing an end. The platform is also grappling with the widespread use of hate speech, which is driving away advertisers and fueling those massive financial losses. SpaceX is under scrutiny from the EPA, the FAA, and Fish and Wildlife for various illegalities. The Starship project is not generating profits; despite the program’s multiple attempts to achieve a successful launch, it is proving the technical design is impractical, and its business model is not a viable option in the present day’s cost-conscious space industry.
Trump, is facing his own judicial future with indictments of business fraud, election interference, election denial, and the illegal retention of classified documents. He’s currently facing 91 criminal charges spread across four separate state and federal cases, with indications that more charges may be forthcoming. In civil court, Trump has been hit with huge damage awards likely to exceed $400 million related to business fraud and his rape of E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s business empire also appears to be at an end, with the NY AG waiting on the cancellation and liquidation of over 500 Trump companies in New York.
So, if you’re a populist billionaire with fascist tendencies, what to do? Well, the guys have settled on attacking the court system, marginalizing immigration, denigrating access to abortion services, and perpetuating the misogynist ‘trad’ culture, to name just a few of their greatest hits in the last year. They both are against supporting Ukraine from Putin’s illegal invasion. They both are reportedly (1)(2) drug abusers (if you need addiction help click here). Musk is staunchly anti-trans, Trump anti-LGBTQ. This is an evil dynamic duo of repressors for the ages.
With 174M Twitter followers, Musk is easily the most visible person online. Trump has about 80M US residents in his MAGA cult. There is massive group overlap, for sure, but we can assume at least 200M+ people are being fed a daily diet of recriminations designed to marginalize the societal structures America has developed in its post-war modernization.
With each attack, Musk and Trump, each in their own orbit, chip away at the structures of American society, as well as try to pull back any social gains that have been hard won. Trump with his rigged election lies, and Musk with his immigration lies, they both benefit and thrive when there is destabilization in the American public.
There is some hope on the horizon. Trump will very likely be convicted in all his criminal trials, and if we get at least one verdict and prison sentence before Nov., then this might be enough to sway voters away from him. There are polls showing Trump stacking up weakly against Biden in a general election, however, Biden has not done himself any electoral favors with his stance on Gaza, student debt, or immigration.
As for Musk, he has major business problems ahead. Twitter is nearing insolvency, the same for SpaceX. Musk has publicly said Tesla’s value is entirely tied to FSD, which clearly does not work and is deadly. Hyperloop, and the Boring Co., are effectively already dead. Neuralink recently implanted a chip in a human subject, after killing over 1500 animals testing its brain implant, so that doesn’t seem too good.
In the landscape of American politics and business, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have emerged as truly evil figures who both started out simply as self-promotors looking for a edge. Today, they are both redefining American life for the next generation in such a negative way that the effects might become permanent.
