Item one: The conventional wisdom is that Trump holds more cards than Musk. But if that’s wrong, we’re in for some fun times. |
| For starters, I say Donald Trump is due our congratulations and respect. He finally found a white Afrikaner he’d like to throw out of the country. The early conventional wisdom on the Trump-Elon Musk divorce is that it was simultaneously shocking and inevitable. I suppose it was both of those things—Musk’s fusillade of tweets Thursday was pretty shocking, especially the Jeffrey Epstein bomb; and it’s true that this was bound to happen one day—no friendship between a ketamine-torqued egomaniac and a sociopathic liar with the emotional architecture of a 5-year-old is destined to go the distance. Taking a somewhat more historical perspective, this is the feud that Milton Friedman’s America deserves. We’ve now lived through decades in which vast fortunes were amassed and lionized—and, importantly, at least in Trump’s case, inherited and far too lightly taxed. Fred Trump gave Donald over $400 million, adjusting for inflation, when he died in 1999. Errol Musk was an emerald-mine magnate who once bragged that he had “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe,” though the extent to which he supported his son is a matter of heated debate (between them, mostly). Whatever the truth is there, the bottom line is that here we are, stuck with a crooked and stupid billionaire president and a crazed narcissist who could buy several countries fighting over which one has the purer, more Friedmansque-reactionary vision for what the United States should become. That’s a crucial matter to which we’ll return, but before we do that, let’s indulge in the fun stuff and just cut to the chase: Does Musk have the goods to bring Trump down if he wants to? You should listen to my colleague Greg Sargent’s interview with Rick Wilson on his podcast today (transcript here, if you prefer). Wilson is entertaining, as usual, but what’s interesting is how his view of this goes against the conventional-wisdom grain. The emerging consensus is that Trump holds more cards here than Musk. He’s the president, after all, and more than that, he is, as we know all too well, a president who’s willing and eager to use the machinery of the state to settle personal scores. By this argument, Musk is in for weeks or months of hell if he doesn’t take steps to tone this down. But to Wilson, “Elon has more weapons here than Trump does.” Prominent among those, obviously, is Twitter. We all know what Musk has done with Twitter since buying it: He’s reset the algorithms to elevate all manner of right-wing sewage—and to promote Donald Trump. |
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| The former Federalist Society power broker used the president to achieve judicial supremacy. Now all that work could get wrecked by the monster he turned loose. |
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| What if Musk decides to reverse that? Most of the pro-Trump chatter on Twitter and other social media isn’t coming from actual human beings. Most of it is coming from pro-Trump “bot farms” that take over accounts or create fake ones for some specific purpose. Some estimates are that 73 percent of all internet traffic is bot-farm-initiated. (And isn’t it lovely that up to three-quarters of what appears to be public opinion is totally faked by cynical and malicious people, if indeed it’s even people behind it anymore?) Musk, Wilson told Sargent, could turn off the Trump bots in about three clicks. Doing that “would change the political climate in this country almost instantaneously,” Wilson said. “He could turn Twitter into a machine right now that will bash the tax bill.” Does that assign Twitter too much power? Could be. But if Twitter turns on Trump and the bill, the political world will notice. The dug-in MAGAs won’t listen. But some of the non-MAGA people currently still saying they approve of Trump’s job performance just might. Trump is still, astonishingly to me, polling in the mid-40s. If he drops down to 40, we’re in a different political situation. Then there’s the campaign. When Musk charges that Trump never would have won without his $290 million … well, that could be just a Johnson-measuring contest, in which case, who cares. But it’s possible Musk knows something about how some of that money was spent. I mean, if I gave somebody $290 million for an important purpose, I’d want to know how it was spent. Maybe it was just spent on those anti-trans ads. But let’s put it this way: We know Trump cheated in 2016. We know he’s cheated all his life at everything. So he got a massive $290 million infusion in 2020 and thought, “Let’s be sure to spend every penny toward legitimate ends!” Seems unlikely. Finally, there’s the nuclear bomb. Let’s refresh our memories on the specific allegation against Trump with regard to Jeffrey Epstein. The week before the 2016 election, a woman who alleged that Trump raped her when she was 13 was about to hold a press conference and go public. She charged that Trump assaulted her four different times at parties thrown by Epstein. The media didn’t take her allegations seriously at first because the woman allied herself with “an eccentric anti-Trump campaigner with a record of making outlandish claims about celebrities,” as The Guardian put it. Then she hired lawyer Lisa Bloom—who had successfully sued the Boy Scouts, among others—and who is the daughter of Gloria Allred, who represented female accusers of Trump and Bill Cosby. The case was taken more seriously. The woman was ready to go public five days before the election, but she backed down after receiving many death threats. Trump, of course, denied the allegations. Does Musk know of actual evidence? He’s not the world’s most stable person either, so it’s entirely possible that he’s blowing smoke. Epstein once told Michael Wolff, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” And Trump told New York magazine in 2002 that “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” We presume innocence in the United States, especially on so touchy a matter as this. But presuming innocence doesn’t prevent us from wondering whether Musk is just trying to cause Trump maximum pain—or if he actually knows something. There were signs Friday morning that the feud was being turned down a notch or two. The White House was desperate for a meeting with Musk to cool the temperature—interesting in itself that it wasn’t the other way around. So maybe Musk won’t follow through on Thursday’s threats. And who knows, with people this unstable, they could easily be BFFs again in six months. But any eulogy for this relationship must first and foremost be a eulogy for the United States of America. An amoral billionaire who by rights should have been impeached and barred from running for office for life became president again—legitimately this time, as far as we know—and put the world’s richest multibillionaire in charge of a sensitive task that he oversaw with the delicacy of a hyena stripping a wildebeest carcass clean. Their efforts have already resulted in deaths around the globe and will cause untold harm in this country over time. And now they’re engaged in a “substantive” argument that can be summarized like this. One, Trump wants a bill that is the usual Republican recipe for fiscal disaster—massive tax cuts for the rich, cuts to programs that help working and poor people, huge deficits and debts as far as the eye can see. The other, Musk, at least professes to care about the deficits and debt, but he’s totally chill with the massive tax cuts for the rich. He’s just against the “pork,” which is rich-man speak for things that might actually benefit people and communities. It’s tragic that working Americans are held hostage to this madness. The small silver lining is the hope that Musk can make Trump’s life as miserable as Trump can make his. |
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| His “departure” from the government is anything but. |
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Item two: Trump and D-Day |
| I hope it didn’t escape your notice, in the midst of the Musk contretemps, that Donald Trump said one of the stupidest and most offensive things he’s ever said Thursday. He was sitting in the Oval Office with new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who brought up the anniversary of D-Day, which, as it happens, is today. To which Trump replied: “That was not a pleasant day for you.” He turned to the press next, adding, and clearly thinking he was being clever, “This was not a great day!” Merz started out by agreeing but then quickly caught himself: “No, that was not a pleasant—well, but in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.” Trump then nodded, agreeing, “That’s true, that’s true.” So: Trump assumed here that Merz’s loyalty was to Nazi Germany over the forces of democracy that saved his country from the Nazis. It’s possible this was a value judgment he was making about Merz personally. But far more likely, he simply doesn’t understand history; thinks, “Well, Germany is Germany” whether under Bismarck (if he knows who that was) or Hitler or Adenauer (if he knows who that was) or Helmut Kohl (if he … you know) or Merz. The ignorance, if he can’t distinguish in his mind between Nazi Germany and the other variants, is so overpowering as to become not just factually incorrect but morally repugnant. And then he nods and agrees: “That’s true, that’s true.” As if to say, “Well, yes, I knew this all along, ha ha.” He didn’t. He inadvertently made it very clear: He thinks of nations in terms of blood and soil, not in terms of the abstract ideas and values that animate them at their best moments. He doesn’t have the knowledge to imagine the latter. Asking him to do so would be like asking a dog to explain Kant. No offense to dogs. |
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| Undoubtedly, Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy; but the bigger threat is the obscene wealth gap that allowed his rise. This event on Tuesday, June 24 will build on our special reporting and polling about the concentration of wealth in America. |
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| Last week’s quiz: “Bustin’ out all over …” Sticking with the Pyramid idea: things associated with June. |
| 1. Why did I title this quiz “Bustin’ out all over”? |
| A. It refers to a pop lyric in a song about June by Taylor Swift. B. It refers to a line in a poem about June by Langston Hughes. C. It refers to the name of a summer replacement sitcom that ran on ABC in 1974 starring Dom DeLuise. D. It refers to the title of a song from the musical Carousel. |
| Answer: D, it’s from Carousel. It’s one of those early Act 1 ensemble pieces Rodgers and Hammerstein used to establish a tone and set the audience a-toe-tappin’. See here, if you like. |
| 2. For whom or what is June named? |
| A. The Roman goddess Juno
B. The Roman Emperor Junius
C. The Roman Senator Juncius
D. The Old English “giunne,” a flower that bloomed in early summer |
| Answer: A, Juno. If you fell for D, shame on you! |
| 3. Father’s Day in the United States originated in Spokane, Washington. Which president first officially sanctioned it as a national day of celebration? |
| A. William McKinley
B. Theodore Roosevelt
C. Woodrow Wilson
D. Calvin Coolidge |
| Answer: C, Woodrow Wilson. It was first celebrated in Washington state in 1910. In 1916, Wilson became the first president to oversee a national day honoring fathers. But it didn’t become an official holiday until … 1972! See here. |
| 4. Which of these historic events did not happen in June? |
| A. The “shot heard ’round the world” that set off the Revolutionary War B. The Battle of Waterloo C. D-Day D. The Tiananmen Square massacre |
| Answer: A, the shot heard ’round the world. That was April 19, 1775. In Lexington, Mass. It’s still unclear from which side the shot was fired. |
| 5. June brings the arrival of which notable insect to the Eastern United States? |
| A. Wasp
B. Stink bug
C. Firefly
D. Spider |
| 6. Match the famous June to the source of celebrity: |
| June Lockhart June Jones June Duprez June Cleaver |
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| Pearl-wearing sitcom housewife Actress, The Four Feathers and The Thief of Bagdad Actress, Lassie and Lost in Space Head coach, Atlanta Falcons |
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| Answer: Lockhart = Lassie; Jones = Atlanta Falcons (yes, he was/is a dude); Duprez = Four Feathers; Cleaver = sitcom housewife, of course. I developed a big crush on June Duprez when I first saw that movie, in part because she’s very pretty in an interesting sort of way, and partly because her character was named Ethne, which I found simultaneously kind of silly and completely sublime. |
| This week’s quiz: How many were going to St. Ives? A quiz on nursery rhymes. Let’s see what we know and/or remember. |
| 1. What is the first authenticated starting point for narratives that were labeled “Mother Goose” stories? |
| A. A German book of children’s folk songs from 1644 B. An English book of children’s rhymes published in 1677 C. A French book of children’s rhymes published in 1695 D. An American book of children’s rhymes and songs published in 1741 |
| 2. In “Jack Sprat,” what word rhymes with “lean,” as in, “His wife could eat no lean”? |
| A. Bean B. Spleen C. Thrapston-on-Nene D. Clean |
| 3. In the British nursery rhyme “The Muffin Man,” where does the title character live? |
| A. Drury Lane B. Camden Road C. Wapping High Street D. Finsbury Circus |
| 4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in seventeenth-century England, this well-known nursery rhyme name referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. |
| A. Old Mother Hubbard B. Little Jack Horner C. Little Bo Peep D. Humpty Dumpty |
| 5. This nursery rhyme has its origin story in the London Great Plague of 1665, when many of the bodies of the deceased—as much as 15 percent of London’s population—were burned. |
| A. “Baa Baa Black Sheep” B. “Ring Around the Rosie” C. “Jack and Jill” D. “Georgy Porgy” |
| 6. This nursery rhyme song has popped up in a host of other contexts: as the apparent basis of a Schumann piece; in an Art Blakey jazz version; as a Three Stooges theme song; and, in calypso form, as a tune sung in an early scene in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. |
| A. “Rock a Bye Baby” B. “London Bridge Is Falling Down” C. “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” D. “Three Blind Mice” |
| In fact, the song begins playing as the opening credits (and the James Bond theme) end. This song starts over the last few seconds of the credits and then continues to play over the first post-credit scene. Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected]. —Michael Tomasky, editor |
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TNR Travel: New Dates Added |
| Join a special group of readers and supporters on a lovingly designed, all-inclusive tour of one of the most spellbinding places in the world. Drawing on The New Republic’s special contacts among local historians, artists, and chefs, we’ve created a first-class experience that will immerse you in Cuba’s colorful and unique history, politics, and culture. |
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