Author’s short take.
Re: “Musk’s budget veto power could extend to auto and space regulations” – Axios, December 19, 2024. On top of the particulars of this story, what should worry all of us who believe in a representative democracy and robust free press is that Musk runs an influence operation through X that rivals anything Putin could pull together. Some pundits are urging Dems to set up a shadow rebuttal op capable of answering every Trump-Musk co-authored lie or cockamamie proposal in an instant. But that would be a round-the-clock challenge and likely impossible. The opposition’s best bet is to play on Trump’s vanity and convince him Musk is stealing the spotlight from him, so they become snarling cats in a bag. Trump will quickly tire of being upstaged and be confronted with a dilemma Putin faces every day – how to survive a monster in his entourage he has helped raise up but whose support he now cannot afford to lose. If this sounds overly dramatic, it’s because our country has never been in this place before, with an all-powerful socially indifferent oligarch vying with an increasingly demented fool for the privilege of wresting power from the people.