I've got to write about something other than The Awfulness, but it's tough. Trump's superpower consists of the gravitational pull on attention, like a train derailment that's gained somehow gained sentience. You just can't look away.
Villainous schemes to revile and hurt our most vulnerable populations I expected. But Trump accompanies these aims with such weirdness. Take over Canada! Rename the Gulf of Mexico! And now Become chairman of the Kennedy Center! He declared himself so earlier today, terminating all board members.
Does he . . . does he want to do this because the Center has honored comedians who've made fun of him in the past? I've heard--and cannot discount--the notion that Trump began aiming for the presidency in earnest way back at an Obama Press Dinner where the then-President made a joke at Trump's expense.
But who knows?
It seems Elon Musk also sets his own evil-scheme victims on the basis of his mercurial mood: USAID! NPR/PBS! The Department of Education! None of these, mind, make up nearly as significant a portion of overall federal spending as, say, defense, social security, or medicare. But each has in some random way landed on Musk's personal radar of pique.
Like Trump, it seems Musk has certain idiosyncratic but reliable direct lines into his brain from certain sources--a bro podcaster, an alt-right pseudo-intellectual, his own brittle sense of cishet masculinity.
And it seems that Musk and Trump are, at least for now, direct lines into each other's brains, circulating crackpot focus zones into collective idées fixes. That's my nearest explanation for Trump's newfound focus on the "plight" of white Afrikaners in South Africa, horribly oppressed by, well, the non-white people who spent decades living under apartheid oppression.
Both also seem to share that juvenile squeal that happens when entitled preteen boys get stymied. Wired has over the past weeks exposed some of the otherwise anonymous (and unvetted, unauthorized, complete unknown) twenty-somethings serving as his advance DOGE guard. One of these the magazine exposed as having made rancidly racist posts, which quickly got him let go. Musk--and now Trump and J.D. Vance--are now calling (squealing) for him to be let back. Can't we have a little grace? tweeted Vance.
Jon Favreau replied, wondering whether he had missed when the 26-year-old had apologized for or recanted the tweets he made when he was 25.
As more and more of the Musk/Trump executive actions get delayed and blunted by courts and unions, we can expect more squealing, I bet. Squealing--spiced with some more wackadoodle fixations.
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