I know, right. Of many many things that pisses me off about the current clusterfuck is I remember having to put up with the tea party era. All these dickwads in powered wigs waving round copies of the constitution and screaming tyranny because the Democrats passed the most moderate compromise of a health reform imaginable. Then they go and elect someone who wipes his ass with the constitution three times a day.
Let’s see? Unelected unaccountable rich magnates having the ear of the president and being the power behind the throne? Yeah the founders were very much not a fan of that, you’d know that if you’d read that constitution instead of waving it round and claiming Obama was an Arab.
‘He isn’t an Arab he’s a fine man . . . totally not one of those dirty Arabs that we should deport to their home countries that we should then turn into parking lots of glass.’
~ Your friend in Jesus, John “Bomb Iran” McCain
So for people who like both Musk and Trump, how do they justify this? Trump needed some help? But if he needs help does that make him less competent? Or did Musk overstep his boundaries and that makes him in the wrong? I mean if someone is correcting the president either that person or the president is in the wrong, right?
I can’t imagine the mental gymnastics to say “Trump needed help and that’s good and also Musk and his kid interupted Trump and that’s also good”.
Personally, I’ve been trying to as much as I can. The country voted for insanity, and there’s nothing I can do about it for the next four years apart from voting at every election.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Trump hates not being the center of attention, so the fact that he just sat there and took it indicates to me that he is being “forced” to put up with it. I don’t know if Musk is just paying him to be the figurehead or if it is even more sinister, like Musk has information on Trump that the orange narcissist is desperate to keep hidden, but obviously something is going on. Trump would never put up with this otherwise.
Some people said they heard the kid telling Trump something like, “You’re not the president, get out of here.” I couldn’t really hear it and can’t stand to listen or look at any of them. If the kid really said that, he probably heard it from his moronic father.
It’s worth remembering that Trump, while still himself, is an old man, and he may be more susceptible to influence than he would have been five years ago, or (at some level) aware that he can’t manage center stage for as long as he once could.
Musk is paying him. 100%. Definitely. The campaign donations was just a down payment, whether through DJT or his crapcoin, or truckloads of bullion. He’s paying through the nose for every second he is in front of a camera doing and saying awful stuff instead of Trump. Ideally the entire American journalistic community would be dedicated finding out how that payment is happening and telling the American people, but nowadays who can say?
Wow you didn’t suppose he has evidence Trump raped someone? Or organized coup? Or gave away nuclear secrets?
And since the Supremes gave Trump a free pass, Vlad’s 2016 kompromat is past it’s sell by date.
If it’s just money, Trump should and probably will try to use national security reasons to appropriate Starlink, SpaceX, X, ad nauseum. It’s what dictators do to oligarchs. Cite: China, Russia.
It just seems suspicious to me, the way trump acted in that “press conference,” if it’s “only” money. Trump loves money, for sure, the more the better, but he could jettison Musk and still siphon off taxpayer money by the truck full. He hates being overshadowed and looking weak. But he just sits there looking constipated while Musk blathers on and on and his kid says out loud on TV “you’re not the president”?
Does he really need Musk’s money bad enough to put up with being scolded by a 4-year-old on TV?
They did this with at least one other lawsuit as well. So, want to Bribe the president? Say something mean about him, get sued, and then capitulate entirely and pay him off. All perfectly legal.
10 million? That’s barely “get to shake Trumps hand” money, not “get to run the government on his behalf” money.
Really no need to go to all that trouble. Trump very kindly created the DJT company (and even made its shares DJT so you wouldn’t be confused as where your backsheesh was going) and Trumpcoin (in case publicly traded shares were a bit too high profile and you’d rather your bribe be little more discreet) for just that purpose.
Example 636434 of how the media utterly failed in the last four years is how both these ventures were not explicitly and clearly called out as the bribery money laundering operations they clearly are
What Trump needs is a hatchet man to get things done; while he has cowed the GOP-controlled Congress they aren’t actually going to be able to pass his agenda legislatively, and while the pseudo-‘conservative’ Supreme Court owes him fealty, they can’t shut down all legal challenges. Musk, who is not an elected official nor Senate-confirmed, can go into the Treasury and other departments and independent agencies, do all kinds of damage and flatly lie about supposed corruption and waste (like the “150 year old Social Security beneficiaries” collecting millions of dollars which is actually an artifact of COBOL filling in a default value into an unpopulated date field), and it is essentially deniable.
Of course, they think they’re setting up Elon to be the fall guy, and Musk is finding ways to get control of major areas of bureaucratic function which so many MAGAts and alt-righties think is stupid and pointless because they still don’t understand that they need the bureaucracy to make any part of government do their bidding in the long term, and everybody else is caught in the middle of this stupid doublecross scam. May the gods help us if Musk/Vance/Thiel actually get the government to invest in a cryptocoin ‘strategic reserve’ because then the fiscal standing of the federal government and valuation of the dollar will be tied to whatever speculators do with ‘crypto’, and nobody in the legislature or executive will be able to wrest control away from ‘the market’ without essentially tanking the economy and standing up a new independent fiat currency with no connection to cryptocurrency.
The media has massively failed in generally explaining how corporate and market ‘investment’ has undermined the independence of the legislature and executive; at this point the openness of the corruption shouldn’t really require deep investigation or explanation, and frankly I think a lot of people just don’t really care as they view it as just one more wealthy person doing rich person things to make more money while everybody else gets fucked. Trump and Musk have become as brazen about it as Russian oligarchs, but to be fair, those oligarchs have bought off politicians on both American parties and their backers for a couple of decades and nobody has made much of a fuss about it other than a few screechy progressives. When such fuckery becomes so broadly accepted it is just normalized, and all this current scammistry is doing is slightly pushing on the boundary of that existing normal.
This is just both-sidesism, and is how we ended up here. Yeah the corporate political situation in the US has been a corrupt shit show long before Trump turned up, and the Democrats have been involved as well the GOP.
But this is absolutely not just another politician with inappropriate corporate links, framing it that way by the media is gross incompetence. This is a soon-to-be president setting up a publicly listed company, valued at billions despite having no value outside being a method of transferring funds to Trump (and then setting up a cyber currency with the same purpose but even less oversight). Yet no one in the media said that. It’s far far worse than anything other politicians have done, saying otherwise helps Trump.
If it is “both-sidesism”, it is because “both sides” have been broadly complicit in the corporate takeover of American government, a trend that has its tendrils going back to the Reagan era (or, in the arguments of some, even all the way back to Truman and Eisenhower) but found full bloom during the rush to deregulation and removal of corporate oversight during the Clinton Administration. That Trump, Musk, et al are doing all of this out in the open and the Congress (even most Democrats) aren’t screaming about it from the top of the Capitol Rotunda shows just how normalized this kind of corruption has become. And observing that isn’t trying to “[help] Trump” or arguing that it is business as normal, but showing just how far what is tacitly accepted as normal has become, or in the language of political pundits, just how far the proverbial “Overton window” has shifted in accepting such corruption.
That crypto techbros are basically able to set up their darling marionette to be as fake-rich as they are with a scheme that is transparently a scam begs the larger question of why we, as a society, and the media that identifies itself as a ‘watchdog’, have collectively accepted the entire cryptocurrency ‘economy’ as a somehow legitimate means of ‘wealth creation’ that creates no products and provides no service of any tangible value. That we’ve bought into it on a societal level as ‘real’ wealth instead of electronic Monopoly money has allowed this avenue for open bribery to even exist.