It doesn’t matter if Elon Musk is the richest man in America or the second or third richest. What matters is that he’s one of the biggest threats to democracy in his adopted country. He’s been using Twitter to lay the groundwork for the kind of fascist takeover of the U.S. he believes Trump will bring. Yesterday, the NY Times showed how he uses his social media platform to spread GOP propaganda and deceit about Biden. Musk on Biden: “He is just a tragic front for a far left political machine.” I wish!
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac wrote that “Musk has steadily ramped up his criticism of Biden as the campaign season heats up before the November presidential election. Musk has posted about Biden on Twitter at least seven times a month since January, attacking the president for everything from his age to his policies on immigration and health… Musk’s posts about this year’s presidential race stand out because he is signaling a willingness to tip the political scales as the owner of an influential social media platform, something that no other leader of a social media firm has done. And Musk exerts outsize influence over the political discourse on Twitter, where he regularly posts to his 184 million followers… By bringing an ideological bent to Twitter, Musk mirrors what media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, whose empire includes Fox News and the New York Post, have done by helping shape their outlets’ coverage and broader political discourse.
Musk has also repeatedly used Twitter to vocally support right-wing politicians around the world, including Javier Milei, the president of Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil; and Narendra Modi of India. He has then tried to use that good will to lobby for advantages in those countries for his other businesses, including SpaceX, a rocket company, and Tesla, which makes electric cars.
…Musk has long been critical of Biden. In 2021, the billionaire slammed Biden for his decisions on electric vehicle promotion and subsidies, most of which favored unionized U.S. auto manufacturers. Tesla, where Musk is chief executive, has resisted efforts to unionize its manufacturing.
…Last month, at a dinner party in Los Angeles, Musk along with other billionaires, including Murdoch and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, discussed how to oppose Biden’s re-election.
On Thursday, Musk’s preferred candidate was in the Bronx. His rally drew around 2-3,000 people, although the permit was for 3,500 people and Trump’s professional liar-in-residence made up the figure 25,000. On Friday, Jonathan Last ran this video:
He wrote that one of Trump’s theories of the 2024 cycle is that his criminal indictments will help him with black voters because many black people are also in the criminals justice system and will relate to his plight and support him. “This may sound racist,” wrote Last, “but we know that Trump believes it because he’s said it explicitly. But we also know it because yesterday he held a rally in the Bronx where his campaign handed out posters of his mugshot and welcomed onto the stage two black gang members who are currently indicted as part of a criminal conspiracy for crimes that include murder, attempted murder, and a dozen shootings. These two gang members endorsed Trump,” likely because they know he has a history of pardoning criminals who back him. Last isn’t naive and he wrote “I can’t tell you why Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow endorsed the former president. Maybe they have strong feelings on tariffs. Maybe they believe that NATO membership represents a dangerous entanglement for American interests. Maybe they think that the family separation policy from Trump’s first term was misunderstood and actually represented a reasonable deterrent to undocumented immigrants. Or maybe they just like Trump because he’s a criminal, too. He’s just like them.”
Last asks rhetorically, What if Trump is right about the black vote? Not that he’ll win a majority, but if he were to take 20 percent— or even 15 percent— of the African-American vote it will hurt Biden. He’s currently polling in the low 20s with blacks. But more than that, what if Trump is right about America? Because as unpleasant as it is to acknowledge, Trump has been right about a great many things.
(1) Republican voters. For 40 years it was dogma that Republican voters wanted a president who blended social and fiscal conservatism and waited his turn to run.
In 2016, Trump understood that Republican voters no longer wanted any of those things. They wanted the craziest son-of-a-bitch available.
(2) The Republican party. The GOP looked like a formidable, disciplined gatekeeper. Trump understood that it was weak and would go along with whatever a man of pure will demanded of it.
(3) The Conservative movement. For three generations conservatives pretended that they cared about policy ideas, such as restrained spending, small government, free trade, and robust foreign policy. Trump understood that the Conservative movement only cared about triggering libs and that so long as he made liberals unhappy, conservatives would take whatever he gave them.
(4) Presidential politics. National politics has long been forward-looking and results oriented. Voters liked and rewarded presidents who passed legislation and talked about the future instead of re-litigating the past. As president, Trump was indifferent to legislating— his major accomplishments were a tax cut and criminal justice reform. As a 2024 candidate, Trump has basically no legislative proposals and spends most of his time talking about his personal grievances.
What’s more, Joe Biden dedicated his term to passing a string of bills, all of which were popular and many of which were bi-partisan. Voters seem not to care about any of this governing. At all.
Trump understood that American politics had transformed into an attention economy.
(5) COVID. You really aren’t going to like this, but Trump was right about the politics of COVID. At the end of the day, people cared more about the economy than the deaths.
It amazes me that today when people complain about what went wrong during COVID, they talk about business closures, travel restrictions, remote schooling, and sometimes having to wear masks in public parks.
They never talk about the 1 million Americans who died from COVID during the pandemic.
Trump understood that the living do not care about the dead.
(6) Taiwan. America has long adhered to a policy of strategic ambiguity on whether or not it would defend Taiwan militarily. In 2019, Trump told a Republican senator, “Taiwan is like two feet from China. . . . We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”
The war in Ukraine suggests that this is almost certainly correct: The American political system can barely do the minimum required to keep Ukraine in the fight and even that aid could end permanently after November.
There is no question that our country lacks the political will to defend Taiwan. I suspect do not even have the political will to give them military aid, should China move against the Taiwanese.
There are other things Trump understood. He figured out that impeachment was a constitutional dead-letter. He knew that criminal trials could be delayed or sabotaged by helpful judges. He pegged Nikki Haley the first moment he saw her on TV.
In each of these instances, Donald Trump understood reality better than most people— certainly better than I did. As Katherine Miller once put it, “Trump is the grinning skeleton in the crowd; what he reveals about other people is the most important thing about him.”
I wonder:
What if Trump isn’t gaming his way into minority rule? What if he’s not trying to draw to an inside straight, like he did in 2016 and almost did in 2020?
What if his theory about who Americans really are, about what this country really wants, is right?
Robert DeNiro cut new spot for Biden:
Yesterday, the NY Times noted that Trump’s pattern of sowing baseless election doubt has intensified for the 2024 cycle. “[H]his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest, wrote Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart, “are a significant escalation” over what he did in 2016 and 2020. His “refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election had historic consequences. The so-called ‘Big Lie— Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him— led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol and two of four criminal indictments against Trump, as well as his second impeachment. But Trump had planted seeds of doubt among his followers long before Election Day, essentially setting up a no-lose future for himself: Either he would prevail, or the election would be rigged. He has never given up that framing, which no evidence supports, even well after the end of his presidency. And as he seeks to return to the White House, the same claim has become the backbone of his campaign.”
Long before announcing his candidacy, Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to target him. But it took until March of last year for Trump to settle on a new accusation: that the multiple legal challenges related to Trump’s business and political activities constituted a “new way of cheating” in order to “interfere” in the 2024 election. He has made versions of that accusation more than 350 times.
“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, three days after announcing his 2024 candidacy. His comments were in response to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to supervise the Justice Department’s criminal investigations related to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and Trump’s decision to keep classified documents at his Florida resort.
By last summer, Trump had honed the language and made it a staple of his stump speech: “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
…Trump Trump has adapted the specifics of his accusations with each of the three election cycles. But in each case, his pattern of discourse has followed the same contours. He sows doubt about the legitimacy of the election, and then begins to capitalize on that doubt by alluding to not necessarily accepting the election results— unless, of course, he wins.
This rhetorical strategy— heads, I win; tails, you cheated— is a beloved one for Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate. He called the Emmy Awards “a con game” after his television show The Apprentice failed to win in 2004 and 2005. And before he officially became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, he began to float the possibility that the primary contest was, as he said, “rigged and boss controlled.”
By May of that year, Trump spoke plainly about why he had stashed the argument away. “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system,” he said, “but now I don’t say it anymore because I won.”
Late that summer, with his sights set on the November general election, Trump tested out a new line, contending that “the media” was “rigging” the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. His assertions intensified in October after a recording surfaced of him speaking in vulgar terms about women.
“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election— if I win,” Trump said at a rally in 2016, three weeks before Election Day. And though he would end up winning the Electoral College and the presidency, his failure to secure the popular vote led him to form a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to “prove” that rampant voter fraud was to blame.
In December 2019, well into Trump’s re-election campaign, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives impeached him, saying he used the levers of government to solicit election assistance from Ukraine in the form of investigations to discredit Biden. Trump subsequently said that Democrats were using the “impeachment hoax” to “interfere” in the election.
The Covid-19 pandemic gave him a new rallying cry, centered on election integrity: Mail-in ballots were “dangerous,” “fraught with fraud” and were being used to “steal” and “rig” the election, he said.
About six weeks before Election Day in 2020, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. “We want to make sure that the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Trump said.
This time, it was half a year before Election Day 2024— and after more than a year of pushing the “election interference” line about the criminal charges against him and repeatedly warning that Democrats are “cheating”— that Trump again placed conditions on his acceptance of election results.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
