"In The Atlantic earlier this year, Jill Filipovic called
this version of manhood “The Adolescent Style in American Politics.” I called it “Toxic
Immaturity” in 2023. This style of masculinity rejects the old-fashioned
notion that being a man means being a provider, a moral exemplar or a
protector. That’s been replaced by disruption and edgelord posturing without
any accountability to other people. If that’s what passes for aspirational
masculinity these days, men
and boys are in more trouble than I thought."- Jessica Grose, NY Times,
‘Musk and Trump’s MAGA Masculinity'
The WSJ editorial with its header and sub-header today :
The Trump-Musk ‘War of the Roses’
The erstwhile political allies will both lose this
nasty divorce.
highlighted all you needed to know about yesterday’s Billionaire
Bro Brawl in full public view. As the
WSJ editors put it:
“Someone could have cleaned up choosing the closest date for
the inevitable divorce between President Trump and Elon Musk.
This pair of modest egos were never a good match for the long haul, and on
Thursday their breakup turned into “The War of the Roses.”
It certainly makes for entertaining political theater, at least for Democrats.“
And why shouldn’t it have made for entertaining theater for not just Dems but all sane citizens? Or at least brought a bright interlude amidst the serial carnage wrought on this nation by these two vile megalomaniacs. For Dems it was indeed a gift from the gods to behold a social media cage match that may finally give them hope to overturn Trumpism. (Or as Nicole Wallace described it on Deadline Whitehouse,“two tarantulas facing off inside a gold gilded jar”).
I.e. women are to be served up on their macho paws, not respected - and certainly not to become President. No surprise the macho apes on display included Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock, whose hijinks even the conservative WSJ couldn't let stand writing (The Wall Street Journal (p. A6, July 20-21):
Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help get
Trump elected, said that the president was ungrateful and wouldn’t be sitting
in the Oval Office without him. He
stated the Dems would have gotten the House, and also the Senate 51-49, as well
as the presidency. Not far from the
truth, given Musk’s $290 million in ads – mostly seeded in the swing states –
spread enough lies to mislead enough morons to vote a felon and traitor into power.
In yet another round Musk floated the idea of starting a third political party and
agreed with a tweet that Trump should
be impeached.
The ‘nuclear instant’ transpired when Musk also said Trump’s name was in the files on disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, which is why, he said, they haven’t yet been released. (He even included a video of Epstein and Trump yucking it up together at a 1992 party).
Democrats, Steve Bannon and the social-media universe wasted little time in weighing in. So did the 200,000 cut from the federal work force at the hands of these two egomaniacal misfits. So did half the nation disgusted by Capt. Bonespurs authoritarian ploy of using masked thugs to seize innocent people off the streets, captured in these video frames on All In last night:
‘Menacing’: Hayes sounds alarm on rise of ‘secret police’ under Trump
Bannon for his part demanded Dotard deport Musk and seize all his assets, Space X, Tesla and Starlink.
Back to the Billionaire Bro Brawl: The 3rd party and impeachment threat was too much for Dotard so he responded by threatening Musk’s government contracts, along the lines intimated by Bannon.
Predictably, shares of Musk’s electric-vehicle maker fell 14% Thursday,
losing about $152.4 billion in market value, the stock’s biggest one-day slide
on record.
Will any further newsworthy stuff transpire, foreshadowing a final irreparable rift and benefit the nation? Who knows? We will have to see what unfolds over the next few days and if the Reep manosphere is finally kneecapped paving the way for an end to Trump 2.0. But look, ending Trump's mad Megabill would be win enough, certainly for the millions who'd be adversely affected,
See Also:
by Ailia Zehra | June 6, 2025 - 5:22am | permalink
The Associated Press's White House correspondent Seung Min Kim has said the public feud between President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk could have serious consequences for the president's agenda.
While speaking during a segment on CNN Thursday, Kim said she heard some early reactions to the development from some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill who fear this spat could impact Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill."
She said Rep. Ryan Zinke, (R-Mont.) who served as interior secretary in Trump's first term, said this fight "can put the bill in serious jeopardy."
"You have the richest maWho Owns America? Musk and Trump Are Fighting Over the Deed
by Thom Hartmann | June 7, 2025 - 5:08am | permalink
The alpha-male dick-measuring contest between Trump and Musk isn’t entertainment: it’s the inevitable outcome of America’s complete surrender to oligarchy.
After centuries of democratic progress, we’re watching the World’s Richest Man® and the World’s Most Powerful Man® battle for supremacy on social media like feuding warlords. How did the land of Lincoln and Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy, become a playground for billionaire sociopaths?
The answer has a name: John Roberts.
Back in the day, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned us:
n in the world, and you have the most powerful man in the world going up against each other," the Montana Republican said, per the reporter.
And:
And:
The mesmerizing, painful Trump-Musk meltdown
“They played a psychological game — with each other and the
world — intended to wreak havoc, a word whose roots are in the ideas of plunder
and pillage, before coming to mean destruction more generally. On
Thursday, as
the partnership collapsed, they embodied all the definitions. Trump accused
Musk of feeding at the government trough and threatened to cut off his plunder.
Musk retaliated with the nuclear allegation of a possible cover-up of Trump’s
ties to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
No relationship has room for more than one narcissist. This
fact alone was probably terminal for the Trump-Musk marriage, but it did not
help that the two billionaires are so much alike. Effective teams have
complementary traits, not redundant ones. Trump and Musk both specialize in
bellicose social media, share flitting attention spans and are standouts in
shamelessness. Whatever dank psychological wellsprings supplied the water for
these weeds were sure to be overtapped.”
“Musk seems to have realized that his crusade to slash
federal spending (original goal: $2
trillion; reality: more like $150
billion) was no match for Trump’s One
Big Beautiful Bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on
Wednesday said would add $2.4
trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Trump’s demand
that the debt ceiling be
raised by another $5 trillion was going to more than wipe out any
spending cuts made by Musk and his team. Ending diversity, equity and inclusion
programs, or trying to uncover waste and fraud, he learned, is just nibbling
around the edges of the government-spending behemoth.”
The Alarming Part of the Musk-Trump Dispute
“At the height of the juvenile flame war on Thursday between
the world’s richest man and its most powerful one, Donald Trump posted a barely
veiled threat on his website Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in
our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s
Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote.
“I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
All the tech oligarchs and business titans who’ve thrown in
with Trump, apparently deciding that strongman politics are good for business,
should think carefully about that post. In it, you can see the transition to a
new kind of American regime.
Until approximately six months ago, business leaders did not
have to worry that voicing their opposition to an American president could tank
their enterprises. Now, it’s widely understood and even tacitly accepted that
the president will wield the power of his office to crush his enemies. That’s
why stock in Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, plunged while he fought with
Trump, losing, astonishingly, about
$150 billion in market value on Thursday”.
No comments:
Post a Comment