No, You Keep Him.
Elon Musk was once a Democrat—as Democratic a voter as you or me. He thought that the party was the future of the country, and that it served his entrepreneurial purposes. Then he decided that Democrats were “unkind,” and he opted to take his business elsewhere. All this happened in 2022 when President Biden supposedly disrespected his vehicles. Biden also failed to invite him to brunch when the EV Oligarchs gathered at the White House. Musk’s new-found Republicanism was a kind of rebound affair.
Now, of course, he’s in the political wilderness. Trump is threatening to nuke his contracts, and he demanded that Elon return his friendship ring. They’re no longer sharing the same Netflix account. I saw one of his god-awful cybertrucks yesterday and began screaming obscenities behind the safety of my windshield. Naturally, the other driver couldn’t hear me. I may be opinionated, but I ‘m not an idiot.
But Musk has troubles bigger than I am. His stock is in the toilet. He can’t sell vehicles in Europe. His rockets explode, and everyone hates him. His five-year-old kid hit him in the face, unless it was one of his twenty-three wives. If he doesn’t manage to turn all of this around, his board is going to dump him in the street.
But even so, the astonishments keep coming. No sooner had he popped a ketamine for the return to Austin than Democratic operatives began to dream of retrieving him. Now that he’s denounced the Big Brutal Budget Bill, maybe he’ll come back to his political home. All that money! All those tech bros! All that credibility waiting to be exploited! I would gladly name names, but it would be harsh and mean-spirited. Katy Tur. Mondaire Jones. Yessiree, I’m looking at you.
It would be hard to shake my loyalty to MSNBC, but if it were a subscription service I would have cancelled it right there. If the Musk Misfortune has taught us one thing at all, it is that character matters and sanity is essential. All that credibility? None of it is left. A ketamine fiend, even if he owns Starlink, is useless to everyone, especially when his discipline is the size of a flyspeck. A man-child who bounces onto the national stage with no expertise, no experience in government is an IED waiting to detonate. His personal behavior was a shameful catastrophe, a bowel movement without a diaper to contain it.
As for the matter of money, there is effective funding and useless spare cash. Musk brought the second to the judicial election in Wisconsin and it was the first of his Great Big Public Defeats. Americans know all about arrogant Baby Hueys, and their consensus judgment is that Musk is intolerable. We imagine that every voter can be bought, and that MAGA voters are uniquely delusional. That isn’t true and never was. Musk did influence voting patterns in the last contests for Congress, but what people really value is reliable authenticity. Musk came into his position inside a cloud of self-interest, shot through with lightening bolts of arrogance, stupidity, and mania. Nothing he did dispelled that foul first impression.
What is absolutely certain is that Trump will win this. Just as he denied Project 2025, claiming that it was the work of nameless others, so the Big Brutal Bill will become Elon’s Albatross. People who lose health care are going to need a scapegoat. This one has Elon’s name all over it.
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