It Turns out that, When our Laws and the Constitution are No Longer Enforced, you No Longer Need to Be President to Rule America
Musk must wish that all Workarounds could be this easy!
I have watched for years as Elon Musk has made himself into the single most important and powerful person in our country.
He has built some of the world’s most successful, technologically advanced companies.
He has managed to make his companies and his technologies indispensable to many of our most essential commercial and military systems and capabilities.
He has deployed his financial and technological power around the globe, making it virtually indispensable to many other peoples and militaries.
He has forged business alliances, strategic partnerships, and/or ‘understandings’ with most of the world’s leaders and oligarchs.
He has amassed the world’s largest fortune, and now, most importantly,
He has become the favorite son of the most insecure, needy, narcissistic, and pathologically delusional President we have ever had. Elon has made himself into the brilliant but ruthless, bad-ass son Trump never had — and as such, Musk holds a special place in Trump’s orange, shriveled heart.
General Mark A. Milley, Donald Trump’s own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was quoted in Bob Woodward’s book, War, saying that Donald Trump was “fascist to the core” and that he was “the most dangerous man to America.” But I believe that General Miley is now wrong about that.
The most dangerous man in America, by far, is Elon Musk. He is a megalomaniac with delusions of literally galactic grandeur. He’s unlike anyone we have ever experienced before in the history of our nation.
As he consolidates his personal power over essential tools of fiscal and personnel management and even governance of the United States, Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming the most powerful — and dangerous — man in the world.
For years, I have expressed to friends and family my sense of how brilliantly he has managed to make himself and the technologies he owns indispensable to our nation and around the world.
Musk’s stated mission in life is to colonize Mars so that humans can gain a foothold on spreading throughout the galaxy and beyond. And he has expressed his intention that this colony should be populated with a selection of the best of us (did someone say a ‘master race?’) so that the best of humanity can survive the likelihood that life on earth might become unsustainable due to natural or stupid-human-made causes.
For years, I have also taken comfort in the fact that, given his galactic aspirations, at least Elon Musk is not a native born American. Therefore, he could never be elected President.
I was clearly a product of that quaint period prior to this one where the Constitution of the United States actually mattered to how the country was governed.
Silly me.
This was before Silicon Valley Billionaire Bros took digital and AI ‘matter’ into their own hands and re-cast themselves as superheroes — and their aspirations as intergalactic quests. None more so than Musk.
As it just happens, I was working on this post this morning when my wife brought to my attention Ezra Klein’s just interview of longtime chronicler of SIlicon Vally Tech Bros, Kara Swisher, in this morning’s New York Times. You must read it.1
Here are some money quotes from Swisher about Musk that explain so much:
“Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character. He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most.”
An a little later, Swisher adds:
“This goes back to Peter Thiel. If you spend time reading Peter Thiel, that is what he’s saying: Democracy doesn’t work. We’re going to start with something else.”
“And that is sort of the ethos of “move fast and break things” — which is a software term. They don’t want to build. They want to break. And they can’t build until you break . . . Think of all the words they use. It’s all about destruction. And it’s not creative destruction. It’s: Let’s wipe the slate clean, and then we will build the civilization we want. And let us show you how we can get back to glory.”
“A lot of people will ask: How can they do this? How can they do this? And I’m like: They don’t care for you. They don’t think about you. You’re nothing.”
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Trump and Musk are a dream team of chaos agents, and democracy destroyers. Musk’s otherworldly eugenics-adjacent fascistic ambitions match-up well with Trump’s insatiable narcissistic pathology.
And they know that there are legions of haters happily ‘standing by,’ to see what collateral damage they can cause and what spoils they can grab.
But neither Trump nor Musk will ever be satisfied with what they have. They will always want and take more. Guardrails are for sissies.
So here’s where we are:
President Donald Trump, in flagrant disregard of many federal laws and of fundamental tenets of the Constitution of the United States, and with the advice and consent of both the Republican House and Senate, has granted to the ruthless billionaire mogul Elon Musk the power to assert dominion and control over essential fiscal and managerial tools and functions of the federal government.
Together, they are teaching us a very unfortunate, but very important, lesson:
If there is no Presidential accountability and Constitution doesn’t matter, then lording it over America can be shared with and/or farmed-out to the highest and most ruthless bidder.
This is the MAGA/TechBro fantasy. This is our reality.
I admit that this has been a hard lesson to learn, especially in such a short period of time. But the facts on the ground are there to see. And, again, Kara Swisher helps us to see them even more clearly:
“They don’t care about the consequences of damage. They do not care. They don’t anticipate it . . . Humanity is a bunch of anthills. And we go across anthills without thinking when we’re building roads. We don’t know that the anthills are there. We just do it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Nailed it once again!