Donald Trump Is Ultimately A Buffoon, But Elon Musk Has Been 2 Steps Ahead Of Everyone For A Long Time

Donald Trump parlayed little more than low cunning and blunt charisma into two presidential terms and unquestioned control over one of America’s two major political parties. That’s impressive.

Yet, Trump is not a difficult person to figure out. He wants what’s best for Trump, which is, in his mind, money and fawning adulation. His approach to getting these things is frequently bumbling, ham-fisted, or downright comical. Trump can afford to be imprecise, because his supporters will not turn on him even when his political positions are literally killing them.

Perhaps this is why Trump’s only major policy accomplishment during his first term was a big tax cut that largely benefited him and his fabulously wealthy friends. Today’s Republican base is not going to interrogate to whom the real benefit of tax cuts redound, and besides, the poorer ones like to imagine themselves as rich people just going through several decades of temporary setbacks. Trump’s goals were served.

This time around, Trump is more focused on revenge, but there is no evidence that his motivations have fundamentally changed. He could definitely steer us into some sort of new financial crisis or land us in a war by mistake — things as bad for Trump as for anyone. He wouldn’t do it on purpose though.

Many of Trump’s executive orders will not stand up to judicial scrutiny, at least not if judges continue to care about the Constitution, and Trump likely doesn’t mind all that much. Issuing the orders is enough on its own to elicit ridiculous praise from his hardcore base. Since most of the subject matter of the executive orders poses no direct benefit to Trump himself, what’s the difference to him if they don’t hold up? If Trump wanted more durable policy outcomes, he could put a lot more work into it and pass a bill through the kowtowing Republican-controlled Congress.

Since Trump is essentially doing vaudeville for the intellectually bereft, he is not nearly as terrifying as his chief lieutenant. Unlike with Trump, none of us really knows what Elon Musk is doing poking around within the U.S. government.

About seven years ago, I admired Elon Musk. I thought his approach to spurring adoption of electric vehicles — making them cool and exciting rather than scolding people about their gas-guzzlers — was an innovative, and even profitable, means of fighting climate change. Those vertically landing SpaceX rockets are undeniably cool. Musk’s goal of using his various business endeavors to someday get to Mars seemed a noble means of expanding human knowledge and feeding our collective need for exploration.

Musk presented as an environmentalist. He was science-orientated. Either it was all a facade, or something changed very radically within him.

When Musk bought Twitter, I still thought it was about making money for him. It clearly wasn’t: after its renaming to X, Twitter’s value has cratered. Musk bought this social media platform to curate right-wing political influence.

Now Musk lurks beside the doddering 78-year-old president telling him what to do and how to do it. So far that has mostly consisted of firing tens of thousands of federal workers, including slashing the scientific agencies that have helped make the United States one of the most technologically advanced countries on Earth.

The scary thing is that it is not at all clear what Musk himself is getting out of this. He will get more money, sure, if Trump succeeds in securing more tax cuts for billionaires. But he would have gotten that anyway without inserting himself into the federal government. What Musk is doing is hurting his previous goals of mitigating climate change and getting humanity to Mars. Is it simply the thrill of a raw exercise of power? Is he seeking revenge against the whole federal government because the SEC gave him some trouble about that stupid 420 tweet? Or has he simply gone mad?

The world’s richest man was two steps ahead of everyone when he bought Twitter in 2022. People scoffed when he was jumping around like an idiot at Trump rallies before the election as he poured money into the race. Yet, here we are, with Musk either blindly riding the greatest streak of luck in the history of the world or watching his carefully laid plans fall into place. For the sake of the nation, I sure hope it’s the former. I am not at all confident that whatever Musk hopes to see as the end result of all this destruction will be a good thing for the rest of us.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

The post Donald Trump Is Ultimately A Buffoon, But Elon Musk Has Been 2 Steps Ahead Of Everyone For A Long Time appeared first on Above the Law.