15: Trump, Musk

The Age of the Super A*sholes Trump and Musk are dominating our economy and our politics, which tells us something about the era we're living through .......... Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. .......... To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.......... Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance. ................... Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books ......... Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag. .............. Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018. ............... Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”) ............. Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength. ................ To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.” .............. Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people. .................. In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years. ............... Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion. .................. Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever. ................ Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.” ................... Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.” ....................... Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny. ................... Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights. ................... Musk has 14 kids with different mothers, and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles. ....................... a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame, and a disintegration of public morality — which has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power. ..................... To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad. ................... But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good. ............... Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age. .................. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.

Meet the New Bosses, Worse Than the Old Bosses The second Gilded Age is much uglier than the first .................. Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone. .................. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs. ................. 300 billionaires accounted for 19 percent of political contributions in the 2024 election. And since the election the power of money has grown even stronger. ...................

Musk bought Twitter, not as a financial investment, but to turn it into the right-wing fever swamp it has now become. Larry Ellison, America’s second-richest man, purchased CBS basically to destroy it as an independent news source and convert it into Fox News 2.0, a goal he is achieving — and he is now on track to do the same to CNN.

................. “Donald Trump,” writes Forbes, “has presided over the most lucrative presidency in history,” adding $4.2 billion to his personal wealth since regaining the White House. ................. The Koch family has spent decades doing everything it can to prevent action against climate change and keep America burning fossil fuels. .................. True, Elon Musk is something of an outlier; you have to go some ways down the list to find someone comparably extreme (Peter Thiel is #40.) And he isn’t the first incredibly wealthy man to be deeply bigoted and an avid consumer of conspiracy theories: Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite who published and distributed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery probably concocted by the Russian secret police. ...............

it’s remarkable that the world’s richest man has passionately embraced the “Great Replacement” theory of a sinister conspiracy to replace whites with nonwhite immigrants.

.................. it’s clear that modern America suffers from a combination of cynicism — “everybody does it” — and fatalism — “that’s just how the world works” — far worse than anything we experienced in the robber baron era. ................... The term “robber barons,” popularized in the 1930s by the historian Mattew Josephson, was apt. The great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were accumulated by men who functionally played the same role as feudal warlords extorting tolls from travelers passing their castles. In particular, John D. Rockefeller, the world’s richest man, in effect controlled an essential economic choke point, a sort of financial Strait of Hormuz, through his monopolization of oil refining. .................. Musk and Ellison have both given away less than 1 percent of their fortunes. .................. And Musk in particular is the opposite of a philanthropist. Not only doesn’t he spend any of his own money to help others, he used his power when running DOGE to cut off aid to poor countries, condemning hundreds of thousands of children to avoidable death. And he was gleeful about it ................. So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors........ Meet the new bosses, worse than the old bosses.

Technology and Social Change Rising GDP isn’t the whole story ........... It’s sometimes hard to believe that ChatGPT was first released to the public less than four years ago. At this point AI is everywhere. This may be the most rapid adoption of a major new technology in history.

The Non-Victory Compared to where we were before February 28, it's a terrible failure .................. That agreement, which appears to be no more than a memo of understanding — that is, a set of principles to which Iran and the United States have agreed — stops the fighting and reopens the Strait of Hormuz but it does not deal with the issue that caused Trump to initiate the conflict: Iran’s nuclear program. .................... Recall that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump began bombing Iran. At best, the agreement Trump is touting restores the status quo to where it was when he commenced hostilities. Remember also that Iran had agreed to limit its development of nuclear-grade materials in its treaty with the Obama administration, which Trump revoked in 2018. ................... Iran now is under the control of a more extremist regime than when Trump started this war. Oil prices are far higher, and will take some time to return to where they were before it began (if they ever do). Meanwhile, Trump has caused the United States to be more dependent on fossil fuels than we were prior to his inauguration for a second time, and the high oil prices brought on by his war has enriched Vladimir Putin’s regime. ........ The war with Iran has cost the United States an estimated $90 billion, and that’s a conservative estimate. It has caused widespread suffering throughout the Middle East. It has put Israel in a more precarious situation than it was before — and much of that is due to Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not a party to, and has not approved, the agreement. ........... This doesn’t look like a victory. Compared to where the United States and the Middle East were on February 28, when Trump began this war, it’s a terrible failure.