At the suggestion of a sage adviser and friend who shares my distaste for the current president, I picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson biography about Elon Musk, Trump’s latest super-enabler.
My friend thought the book might offer some solace to gloom-sayers like the two of us.
In Isaacson’s telling, Musk is a micro-focused genius who has a knack for ferreting out marketable “truths” in various off-the-wall ideas but who cannot abide any challenge to his ego or his supposedly superior intellect.
A “man-child who resists potty-training” is the way Isaacson describes his subject at one point. He also quotes Musk as telling his first wife on their wedding night, “I am the alpha in this relationship” – a signature self-characterization if there ever was one.
The inference to be drawn from all this, a hopeful one, is that Musk himself may soon take the lead in busting up his cheek-by-jowl relationship with Trump, the ad hoc “co-presidency” that is enabling them both to lay waste to our liberal democracy.
Musk’s unwavering pattern in any such minuet, business or political, according to Isaacson, is “to shoot himself in the foot” by quickly lashing out at anyone who dares to second-guess or cross him.
There is ample evidence from Trump’s own living biography that he is equally allergic to contradiction and even more needful of potty training.
If you review footage of the recent oval office press conference where Musk, drawn up to full height with his four-year-old son in tow, lords it over Trump, who cringes obsequiously behind the Resolute Desk, you might be forgiven for mistaking Elon and the Kid as the power brokers in the room.
Ironically, the overriding theme of Musk’s public remarks that day was that in eviscerating the administrative state he is simply trying to promote democracy and bureaucratic transparency. It was a variation of Trump’s own practice of turning every truth on its head. For a man who professes absolute dedication to logic and fact, this was hardly proof in packaging.
Musk seems to recognize the risk of trying to stand too tall next to Trump or giving the appearance of doing so. Earlier he had tried to do a little pre-emptive ass-kissing by declaring online that he loved the President as much as any straight man can love another.
The tactic seems to have worked to the extent that Elon continues to have carte blanche to ransack the executive branch in the name of Trump’s own version of efficiency.
But the overweening egotist who emerges in Isaacson’s biography is unlikely to be content to play the sycophant for long, particularly since he seems to have the patience of a gnat on steroids.
Thus, if we are all very lucky, there will soon come a time when the id in Trump’s own bent psychology balks at sharing the spotlight. And at that point Musk, out of some pathological need to “shoot himself in the foot,” will say or do the one thing that goes too far — something that will rouse Trump to yank the leash and thus send Musk into full self-destructive revolt.
If this seems overly hypothetical, it is well to remember how Elon’s own father, Errol, explains his son’s sudden conversion from card-carrying Democrat into a single-minded Maga fanatic.
By Errol’s account, a watershed event was Biden’s failure in August 2021 to invite the CEO of Tesla to a White House conference on how the electric car industry might help combat unemployment. The fact that Tesla was using non-unionized labor may have contributed to the Biden slight. But whatever the cause, Elon felt dissed, proceeded to veer hard right and never looked back.
While Trump has managed not to over-react to his protege’s sudden superstar status, Time’s latest cover showing a photoshopped Elon seated at the Resolute Desk can scarcely go unnoticed in the White House. But – to underscore our central thesis here — if Trump even attempts to cut Elon down to size, he may find himself facing the kind of virulent pushback from Muskrats and their leader that helped doom the Democrats in the last election.
It is a token of the terrible straights facing us that such an outcome is seemingly our best hope at the moment. But when Lady Liberty is backed against the wall and in danger of being gang raped, you take comfort from wherever you can get it.
Many thanks to my friend for giving me something to cheer for.
My friend, incidentally, asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from Musk and/or Trump’s thought police.