Is this significant ?
I don’t think that has anything to do with how well they are getting along. They are getting sued so as to require a senate confirmation of Musk, since he is clearly operating as a cabinet-level administrator. This denial is just a cheap dodge for DOGE, lol.
“A cheap dodge” that permits them to continue operating while everybody who should be accountable shrugs their shoulders and says “I see notheeeng! I was not here! I did not even get up this morning!”
Stranger
Basically, yep.
Musk is younger and healthier than Trump. The odds are good that sooner rather later Trump will either die or become incapacitated beyond the ability to cover up. Either scenario is going to cause chaos, but especially the latter. Musk could benefit from that chaos better than anyone else.
This. Musk could take everyone else down in flames with. Cripple the federal payments system, release hundreds of millions of people’s private financial data, etc. He could set up a fail-deadly to do all of this. He could crash the stock market. He can get enough secrets to buy protection from Russia or China.
At least in the current environment, the opposite is probably true. Musk is not loved by anybody, and seems to be actively despised by many of Trump’s inner circle, likely because of the way he bought himself inside access without spending years toadying up, and he doesn’t really share goals with the Heritage Foundation or anyone else other than (maybe) Peter Thiel, and even Musk and Thiel have had a pretty contentious relationship over the years despite the latter frequently investing in Musk’s companies. Right now if Trump were to die or become incapacitated Musk would almost certainly be pushed into the Thunderdome where he and Bannon can duke it for being “Most Disliked” or “Smelliest Douchebag Extremist” (reader’s choice). Right now Musk has Trump’s attention (and probably some ire) and he is a useful facilitator but he is also the kind of ‘insider’ that authoritarian and fascist regimes tend to hang out to dry as a scapegoat, even moreso for being “The World’s Richest Man”, serving as a exemplar for their willingness to persecute nonbelievers.
We’ll see what happens but I would not put long money on Musk despite how unlikely his rise has been. He’s the kind of guy who begs for a swift kick in the nuts, or in a more permissive environment, to be put to the wall.
Stranger
And Trump would all deny it anyway.
My money is on some combination of …
- Musk realizes that, just like his other achievements, strutting around and being fascist dictator doesn’t fill the gaping hole inside and really show all those people who laughed at him when he was little
- Trump realizes that the huge piles of cash he is receiving from Musk don’t make up for not being the 100% complete center of attention at all times .
Stranger
From outside, he does give the impression of being the type to start a fight in an empty room
He gives that impression from the inside, too. I once heard him screed at length about having to comply with data delivery requirements that the Air Force was paying SpaceX tens of millions to satisfy even though it basically required just hiring a few people to organize their test/manufacturing systems and extract data into a usable form. He’s a big irascible toddler who is perpetually at the edge of a meltdown.
Stranger
I basically agree with what you’ve written here, with the caveat (and I couldn’t tell from your post whether you would agree with this or not) that Trump will only dump Musk once he has no more use for him; he won’t dump him for a petty reason.
Agree. The dude really wears his pathologies like a flag. /melanie
I think this may have been correct in past years, but ISTM Trump is so addled and tired now that he needs a co-president. He really just wants to play golf, troll the masses on Xitter, and leave the daily fascism stuff to someone else (other than the trolling, lol). The issue is that the person he’s chosen is both incompetent and outrageously hateable.
Yeah may true but there is no way he’s not getting paid. No matter how addled and tired he is, it physically pains Trump every time Musk appears on TV instead of him. Being the center of attention and having everyone look at him and paying close attention to everything he says and does is like 90% of his motivation. The remaining 10% being wanting to be personally wealthier that other people.
The fact he took the time to setup two obvious bribery mechanisms in DJT shares and his Trumpcoin (in plain sight while running for president) shows how high this priority was for him.
It’s hard to predict what Trump will do on a given day or how much attention he is actually paying to what is going on. Most of these executive orders are clearly not only written by someone else but at the behest of other parties with Trump blithely signing them. So, I don’t know that Musk has to be useless to Trump; he just has to piss off someone with more suction than Susie Wiles to get exiled even if it is for a “petty reason”. Or maybe Elon will get caught fucking Ivanka (because somehow not all women feel like crawling out of their skin around that creep) and Trump fire him out of jealousy. A man can dream, can’t he?
Stranger
Trump says unfair to US if Musk builds Tesla factory in India
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Tesla has selected locations for two showrooms in the Indian cities of New Delhi and Mumbai, and posted job ads for 13 mid-level roles in India. It does not currently manufacture any vehicles in India.
Trump said it would be “unfair” to the U.S. if Musk did decide to build a factory there.
“Now, if he built the factory in India, that’s okay, but that’s unfair to us. It’s very unfair,” Trump said in the interview.
So it’s ‘unfair’ to the U.S.; but if Musk does it, it’s OK. Might be a source of friction (I hope).
Indeed.
I don’t totally disagree, but Trump has appeared with Leon on teevee multiple times now, so he’s certainly not avoiding it. I have seen annoyance on Trump’s face in certain moments (booger on the desk, etc.), but from his body language overall, I don’t see Trump deeply resenting Leon or being in those specific situations.
I think it may be more correct to say that while Trump wants at least to be the topic of attention all the time, he himself does not need to be the one on screen all of the time. E.g., he seems happy to have morons like MTG out there avataring for him. That may be a reason why he doesn’t mind Leon being on the screen: he seems him as one more person, a very important and wealthy person, out there shilling for him.
Yes. In the first Trump term, we learned that the emoluments clause of the constitution means precisely jackshit (kinda like the part in the 14th amendment about insurrectionists), and now we’re seeing that open bribery is fine, as is the president using his position to promote his own products.
A rare time in which I agree with Trump: stop offshoring every fuckin’ thing, plutocrats!
Howbeit, as unself-aware as Musk clearly is, it can’t possibly escape his notice that he is fucking Tesla with his, um, everything he’s doing. Maximizing that automaker’s fortunes no longer seems to be his priority.
Yes, although some of them seem so stupid that they are probably Trump’s own ideas (e.g., “Gulf of America”).
Real question: Has third-party pissed-off-ness ever caused Trump to fire someone? It’s possible, but Trump rarely seems to care about anyone’s comfort or convenience but his own. Though I do think he cares about competence (according to his own warped standards), so I do think he would listen to others wrt actual fuckups.
I think that, to Trump and most people, that would exceed the “petty” threshold, however.
I don’t know if I am actually rooting for a Trump-Musk breakup. I think Musk is currently doing things both messy and criminal, and it may be better for us in the long term if Musk continues to discredit himself and Trump.
I expect Trump to use that to actually distance himself from those actions under the guise of “I didn’t know what he was doing and he wasn’t following my orders.” That’s why Musk is useful to him and his compatriots. But we’ll see what happens; at this point, my Magic 8 Ball keeps returning “Better not tell you now”, “Ask again later”, and “Reply hazy, try again”.
Stranger