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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Like Donald Trump, Elon Musk maintains regular contact with Vladimir Putin, one of the world’s foremost oligarchs and a virulent opponent of democracy.
Trump himself has become more blatantly fascist in the months leading up to Tuesday’s election culminating in his Madison Garden event eerily echoing the pro-Nazi rally held in the same venue in 1939 including its polarizing racist themes.
Both events, generations apart, were intended to rend the fabric of American society. Like the supporters of Hitler, Trump’s aficionados and the man himself blindly believe whatever spews from his lips in the moment even as it mutates and reverses course.
It’s a dark mirror reflection of approaching anarchy.
The Dark Lord, Mr. X himself, with his deep, deep pockets and his belly-baring leaps in black cowboy boots appears to have permanently upstaged Vice President-designee JD Vance.
Musk, no longer a provocateur for left-wing causes, and free speech (unless it’s to encourage the Trumpeteer to spew further racist and vicious lies about the most vulnerable people in our society) is, according to an in-depth assessment by Public Citizen, driven by the same concerns that drive oil executives to buy politicians – greed and self-preservation.
Mm-hmm. Like his new bestie, Musk and his businesses are beset by indictments including:
- contentions of rampant racism and retaliation at Tesla
- charges that SpaceX contravened the Clean Water Act
- the ongoing SEC investigation of Musk's $44 billion takeover of X
- violating federal voting laws and Pennsylvania consumer protection laws by promising to give away a million dollars a day to registered swing-state voters who support Trump’s reelection
- criminal and civil accusations of fraud, labor violations, and additional investigations by the FTC, OSHA, the Labor Board, and Department of Transportation
The wanna-be Space Cowboy has clearly thrown his lot – and his billions – in with that other high-profile celebrity facing a plethora of civil and criminal investigations. Since he was not born in the United States and cannot run for President himself, Musk has hitched his wagon to the candidate whose win stands to benefit him the most personally.
As recently reported, the Disruptor is busy buying local elections in his home state of Texas for business-friendly Republican judges where a piddly $2 million goes a long, long way. Echoes of Trump stacking the Supreme and District Courts across the country.
His eagerness to elect Trump is clearly rooted in a squalid quid pro quo. Even though labeled “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts” in a recent Politico analysis, the TechnoKing of Tesla hopes to suck even more from the taxpayer teat under a new Trump presidency when the Ego-in-Chief is expected to award Starlink billions in government contracts in the wake of military and spy technology ones already lavished on SpaceX.
Now a memo recently leaked from some Trump bagmen is suggesting the Ex, if re-elected, should use private firms to check appointees’ backgrounds to get around having his pet nominees being rejected or hung up in the Senate. And that they should have immediate access to classified secrets.
Clearly modeled on the most autocratic of corporate absolutism. Like the way Musk now runs Twitter – oops, X – by fiat.
With no opportunity for the pesky Senate to weigh in, an invitation to become Toodlely-do Trump’s Secretary of Cost-Cutting would put the Chief Twit in charge of the hen house, erasing his nasty legal problems and siphoning off more billions in government contracts to boost his stratospheric wealth.
While gutting governmental programs that protect the rest of us.
Because Trump’s #1 fanboy would then have the power to trim the very agencies that regulate his sordid record of corporate compliance.
Specifically, that “…money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that. We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.”
Yup, no more money for services on which the vast majority of Americans depend – infrastructure, Social Security, Medicare, other healthcare support, OSHA, progressive taxation, SNAP, education, oversight of business and landlord abuses, the USPS…
And all the more for Musk’s and Trump’s billionaire buddies.
Mr. X would furiously fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to cancel ten existing regulations for every new one – in 2016 it was a promise of only two for one – promoting his power as uber-affluent enabler.
And the same wealth that catapulted Musk into a household name is symbolic of the economic worldview Trump-blessed Republicans keep blasting out: where the lines between corporate interests and public regulators are blurred, where government officials and commercial actors scratch each other’s backs so they can gobble up taxpayer dollars.
This is the man who wants to spend taxpayer billions to colonize Mars.
This is the man who spread a baseless conspiracy theory that elites are behind a “massive importation” operation importing undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote for Democrats.
This is the man who believes civilization will crumble if people don't have more children even as the planet is suffering under the weight of overpopulation, up from just a billion in 1800 to 8.2 billion today. While he may have spawned 12 children by multiple women mostly by in-vitro fertilization and put $35 million (so far) into a Texas compound to house them, most of humanity doesn’t have that kind of wherewithal.
This is the man whose political presentations are all about showmanship, not content, part stream-of-consciousness and part self-styled stand-up comic punctuated by the star-shaped leaps of an off-kilter cheerleader.
This is the man who asserts that “Jan. 6 was in no way a violent insurrection.”
His clear intent? To derail government regulations which contributed to his legal problems and, as he has claimed, hinder his voracious profiteering.
Not to mention further slash taxes…
Money is, in the Trumpian world view, the ultimate mark of a man.
A Trump win and Musk appointment could generate a tax code amendment to grant the world’s richest man one of the single largest personalized tax breaks in American history.
In contrast, Kamala Harris has pledged to deliver tax relief to middle-class Americans, promising reforms that would help “more than 100 million Americans.”
Musk is as egoistic and egomaniacal as Trump. As excerpted from a Vox interview, when acknowledging his companies didn’t follow safety regulations, it’s “…like, well, those safety measures are stupid, I run my company... I am an expert… The government is just clunky and slowing us down.”
Both have the cis-white male contempt for anyone not of their tribe and both feel personally aggrieved when people don’t instantly agree with them, then pitch pestilential fastballs at anyone who thinks, looks, or acts differently.
Both manifest as quintessential misogynists. Trump’s telling statement that he would protect women whether they “like it or not” is coupled with commitments to maintain that cis-white male control over social mores.
Both qualify as princes of self-pity, King Trump with the imagined injustice of interminable lawsuits and that Harris deliberately disrupted a campaign designed to denigrate the old guy, and Musk with his tumble into a pit of regulation fiends while the masses who used to venerate Prince Willful relegated him from superhero to supervillain.
Money and connections have greased both their lives, with legions of lawyers covering up personal and corporate malfeasance.
Both are enamored of the glittery and possibly existentially dangerous, from cryptocurrency to A.I., and view cutting corners as their birthrights.
The darker side of the Monarch of Mar-a-Lago was on display last week when he went full attack mode on Liz Cheney, once the #3 House Republican, calling her “…very dumb… a radical war hawk… Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
In response, Kamala Harris kindly pointed out: “Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly… unqualified, to be president.”
But the overarching danger to democracy and the future of the United States is that Trump is incompetent, and Musk does not understand the democratic process. Tweet-driven policymaking will position a White House perennially teetering on the brink of a nuclear meltdown.
The Liar-in-Chief, especially, has surrounded himself with advocates of questionable expertise, and neither has the skills to parse reality nor operate in the complex political environment of today’s world on issues that threaten not only the United States but also the planet.
The reality is Musk is just another corporate billionaire who wants to avoid accountability. But no-one – not sleazeball ex-presidents nor billionaire corporatocracists – should be above the law.
The Former’s own ultra-conservative Vice President Dick Cheney issued a statement attacking his erstwhile boss:
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
In fact, no former Republican presidents, vice presidents, or party nominees (other than Loony-Tune Sarah Palin) support Trump. Many have already announced that they will not be voting Trump-Vance.
But will enough voters join them?
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
