Month: June 2025

Now that Musk is mostly out of the picture, should the Democrats take his side in the cat fight? After all, for all of his reactionary and anti-democratic ideas, he stands for an open America, clean energy, and an economy based on the future, not the past. Democrats, by and large, agree with him on these things.

The answer is mostly no. The blue team should probably stop bashing Tesla, but Musk himself is more useful as a cartoon villain than an ally, and his culture war and redistribution positions make him persona non grata with too much of the party.

Like millions of other people, I predicted the Trump-Musk bromance would come to a quick and bitter end. And so it has, although Musk seems to be making some efforts to patch things up. The problems are largely personal; both men have enormous egos and are used to being the boss. But is there more to the story?

Yes. Musk is a CL; he wants to reduce the size of government dramatically in order to give himself and his fellow techno-aristocrats more ability to shape the future. It is a forward-looking ideology. Trump doesn’t care about debt; he just wants to use government to show the world he’s in charge and to provide benefits for his supporters. There are far more MAGA reactionaries in his base than there are CLs. In the end, this is an easy choice for Trump.

The issue isn’t whether sending troops to LA was necessary (it wasn’t), whether the demonstrations had turned into something like riots (they had), or whether the troops were accomplishing anything useful (they weren’t). No, the question now is how far Trump is prepared to press the issue. Is this the point where troops are sent all over the country to shoot peaceful protesters? Will Trump attempt to replace the governments of blue states? TBD.

I predicted last year that public protests against immigration policy would provide the equivalent of the Reichstag Fire if Trump had the audacity to use it. Nothing in the last few days has caused me to change my mind, although it has not happened yet.

In 1687, it must have seemed like James II’s road to autocracy was clear. Monmouth was dead, the long-desired standing army was in place, and Parliament was reasonably cooperative. In a year, however, it had all disappeared; it turned out James’ base of support was a mile wide and an inch deep. How did it all go wrong?

Overreach and incompetence are the wannabe autocrat’s worst enemies, and the liberal’s best friends. Any government that ignores the limits of its mandate, drives out experts, and only listens to the gut of a single eminently fallible man is bound to fail. Really, can anyone name a reactionary autocrat who didn’t bring disaster to his people?

On the once-again President Trump.

Elon Musk has made him quite a grump.

While the bromance is done,

You can’t say Elon won

Because Tesla is in a big slump.