The Joker trumps the King

Trump’s got the throne but Musk calls the shots

The most surprising thing (so far) about this country’s ongoing coup d’etat is how easily Donald Trump, a raging narcissist with a monstrous ego, let a twisted little weasel like Elon Musk steal his thunder and eat his lunch. That our national motto would become Make America South Africa.

But Trump’s muted response to the provocative Time cover featuring Musk, and his dementia-doze at the Resolute desk while Musk held forth at the presidential presser last week, convinced me that he has accepted the Faustian bargain to play the part while Musk holds the power. He can still make billions fleecing his sheep with worthless China-made trinkets, the heritage media will still pretend the Emperor wears a fine suit and is capable of coherent thought, and he can cheat at golf every day.

It was never as if he had any clue what he was talking about or what planet he’s on anyway. But everyone played along, in the kabuki theater of our politics today.

But the press conference blew away any remaining pretense that Trump is in control. He mostly sat mutely while Musk did his usual fairy dance of fact-free allegations and tech bro baby-babble, while Trump signed EOs ceding even more power to him.

In a bizarre and surreal Oval Office circus, Elon Musk and Donald Trump ratcheted up DOGE’s infiltration of the federal government.

The occasion was Trump signing a new executive order furthering seeding DOGE across government and laying the groundwork for a new round of purges of the federal workforce.

The executive order lays out draconian and absurdist methods for extending the hiring freeze Trump previously ordered by, for example, limiting hiring to one employee for every four who depart.

But the true significance of the executive order was empowering DOGE, overseen by the world’s richest man, to have a key role in every department and agency. The result is an arrangement where Musk and his team operates as a layer superimposed between the White House and the rest of the federal government, positioning them as political enforcers in the style of the old Soviet commissars, as TPM’s Josh Marshall noted.

It isn’t at all surprising, of course, that a billionaire South African immigrant’s views would dovetail so tidily with the current Nazi/KKK lovin’ Republican party. Elon grew up during apartheid with a family notable for its rabid bigotry, just like Trump. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, publicly expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic views, promoted a number of conspiracy theories, and was a supporter of South Africa's apartheid system.

His father, Errol, characterized as abusive and violent by his mother, Maye, allegedly once showed up at a neighbor's home with a knife, looking for her.

In the early 1990s, Errol, then aged 45, married Heide Bezuidenhout, 25. They had two children. Jana Bezuidenhout, who later became his romantic partner, was his stepdaughter from that marriage, four years old at the time Errol became her stepfather. Errol has two children with Jana, who was raised as Elon’s sister.

So Elon comes by his bizarre ideas about ‘family’ from his own personal Greek-mythic past.

In the early 1980s, Errol built a lodge in the Timbavati Game Reserve to rent to tourists. In 1986, he acquired rights to the output of three Zambian emerald mines, though he did not own the mines themselves. In interviews, he explained: “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.” He later referred to his wealth during Elon’s teen years in an interview with Business Insider South Africa, saying he had “so much money we couldn't even close our safe.”

He has endorsed the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is gay and that Michelle Obama is a man in drag.

Errol once said that “the only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” apparently inspiring Elon, who himself has 12 children by three different named women, and at least one unnamed surrogate, four of those children having been born in a one-year period between 2021 and 2022.

According to Forbes, after losing their firstborn, Musk and [Justine] Wilson turned to IVF to grow their family. She gave birth to twin sons Griffin and Xavier Musk in April 2004. The couple also used IVF to welcome triplet sons Kai, Saxon and Damian in January 2006. Later on, Musk began dating singer Grimes, who gave birth to their son X AE A-XII. Earlier in March, Grimes revealed that she and the SpaceX founder had welcomed their first daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, via surrogate in December 2021. And there are claims that Elon and Amber Heard had a legal battle around cryopreserved embryos.

He has two more kids with board member of OpenAI and executive at Neuralink, Shivon Zilis, two years old. And now a new one has surfaced, apparently born last year to rabidly racist and homophobic ”author,” Ashley St. Clair.

Most of of the lot were conceived through surrogacy, IVF, or other reproductive technologies rather than actual sex. Not that there’s anything wrong with it… but Musk has spent the last several years spawning litters of new clones, and framing himself as a Messianic figure whose divine genetic code and far-spreading seed will save humanity from extinction. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Musk’s alleged history of trying to pressure employees to have children with him, which some, you know, unenlightened people might think of as sexual harassment.

One of his twin sons from his first marriage came out as a trans woman and, in 2022, officially changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, adopting her mother's surname because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk blamed the estrangement on what the Financial Times characterized as “the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists,” and has said that Vivian's gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to “destroy the woke mind virus.”

So this is the stable genius who is now effectively running this country. Feel better now?

Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of February 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$397 billion.

His deal with the orange devil has put him in the position of disappearing anyone who gets in the way of him sucking up even more federals bucks—and getting away, like Trump himself, with breaking any kind of law he wishes to, without consequence. Especially those that protect public safety.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.

Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies, leaving more sympathetic Republican appointees overseeing those lawsuits.

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.

The events of the past few weeks have thrown into question the progress and outcomes of many of those pending investigations into his companies.

Musk not only has numerous contracts that are overseen by multiple government agencies — including space, media, financial securities and highway safety, but the imaginary office of DOGE created by Trump, has enabled him to tunnel into and access the spending and staffing of every department in the executive branch.

Can you say “conflict of interest”? You’ve never seen one as gargantuan as this. As the Times recounts,

But the upheaval at federal agencies represents one of the first tests of a wide range of conflicts of interest Mr. Musk has brought to the White House, including 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies.

Mr. Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years, making SpaceX, which collects most of that money, one of the biggest government contractors. There is already talk during the Trump administration of expanding these deals, particularly at the Air Force.

Mr. Musk has had a long and contentious relationship with regulators of his companies. He has called the S.E.C. “bastards,” and SpaceX has sued the N.L.R.B., arguing it’s “unconstitutional” after the agency had alleged that the company had mistreated and illegally fired some workers.

Democrats in Congress, and outside lawyers who specialize in government contracting and ethics, have questioned Mr. Musk’s position, saying that they cannot identify a time in American history when a corporate executive with so many regulatory matters, as well as billions of dollars in federal contracts, has had such power over government operations.

No shit, Sherlock. The abrupt and illegal firings of crucial personnel at various agencies has already allowed Musk to skate on substantial fines ranging from safety violations at Space X and Tesla, to animal cruelty at his company Neuralink.

Both investigations arose after a nonprofit, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, discovered through a public records lawsuit in 2021 that Neuralink had allegedly mistreated dozens of test monkeys, Ryan Merkley, the nonprofit’s director of research advocacy, said in an interview.

“They suffered from infections, internal bleeding and there were surgical mistakes that were made where devices that were screwed to the skull came loose,” Mr. Merkley said.

The power that Musk has assumed has even alarmed super MAGAtic and former Trump Bestest Boy, Steve Bannon. Now Stevie must be jealous, because he has obviously been Left Behind, but he is still a major MAGA influencer.

Former White House chief adviser turned conservative commentator Steve Bannon blasted billionaire Elon Musk over his efforts to reduce the size of the federal government and gain more power in the U.S.

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,” he said during an interview with the website UnHerd. “He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”

Bannon, a staunch populist who has used his widely followed “War Room” podcast to rail against the “elites” in society, has sharpened his attacks on Musk as the tech billionaire has grown closer to President Trump.

But Musk and his minions have already burrowed deep into the primal code of many agencies, including the FAA — where the man responsible for the crash-prone Tesla cars and Space-X rockets plans to “overhaul” the US air traffic control system, after firing hundreds of employees.

Also of course the Treasury, the IRS, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, all gold mines full of your personal data— tax returns, debts, investments, bank accounts, medical information, et al — which they can now access to do, well, whatever they want with it. Who’s going to stop them? Democrats have very little power to do much of anything, except bring lawsuits and hope they get a judge who isn’t MAGAtized.

Musk is lying to the American public in order to justify deep cuts to Social Security, all in the name of eliminating fraud. It’s a smokescreen for what he is really after.

The legacy press is doing a lousy job letting the public know that Musk’s statements are bogus and easily disprovable. They’re doing an even worse job explaining that Musk has a nefarious agenda behind all his false fraud claims. If we keep letting him lie, the public will continue to hand him the keys to the kingdom, all in the name of solving non-existent, wholly fabricated problems. We need to see this clearly. Just as fascists have done throughout history, Musk’s claims of rampant fraud are a false flag operation on a massive scale. And he’s busily duping our whole body politic into going along.

The only efficiency Elon Musk cares about is how efficiently he can take your money to line his own pockets. Despite President Trump’s campaign promises, Musk is coming after your earned Social Security benefits.

Musk is drawing on an old playbook of claiming that the government in general, and Social Security in particular, is full of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Then, when he steals your benefits, he will claim that he is simply cutting waste.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general.

While DOGE begins to make deep cuts throughout the government, Musk and those acting on his behalf have called for implementing new artificial intelligence systems in federal agencies and completely overhauling American weapons programs. As humanitarian aid groups reel from Musk’s cuts, tech and defense firms are seeing a chance to integrate themselves deeper into the new Trump administration’s agenda.

Trump and Musk launch mass layoffs at several US federal agencies

Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised DOGE on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects.

Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, claimed the cost cutting would target “sacred cows of the deep state”.

“This is a revolution, some people are gonna get their heads cut off,” Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, added.

Trump’s fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the US government and raised fears of a threat to US democracy.

Chaos is the point, chaos is the means and the end, chaos is the ultimate goal.

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the author advises that “in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Here, Tzu is speaking of unorthodox actions — surprise attacks and other maneuvers outside the typical boundaries of battle.

Anyone with a brain could see what was coming from trump, if elected — grandiose, deranged promises and pronouncements, vainglorious and idiotic actions, and a naked power grab to defund the federal government and raid social services to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest. But the expectation was that it would be achieved by orthodox, legal means, by Republicans using their majorities in Congress to ram through legislation.

Musk appeared suddenly at the end of the presidential campaign and appealed to the anarchists and nihilists, the literal bomb-throwers who have become the Republican base. They cheer him and seig heil with glee as they watch the pretty flames of their own house burning down.

Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, Harrington contended that what she calls a “tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency. Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them (the broligarchy) in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.”

The sheep who bleat the loudest about “big government” and the hated “elites” now drool over the billionaire fleecing them. As the Guardian notes,

Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank”, Senator Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage to help out the big Trump donors and special interests.”

“‎Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos.” — The Dark Knight

Musk undoubtedly relishes the idea of himself as a powerful, soulless villain, dangling the lives of millions of little people over an existential abyss, as they stand to lose everything they have as Americans.

We are now like insects trembling on the wires of a web, waiting for the spider's next move. Thousands of jobs are cut at the IRS — will your tax return ever show up? Your Social Security check? Will your doctor accept your Medicare or Medicaid? Will the local hospital or health clinic still be open? Are the eggs and milk and meat you buy infected with bird flu or E coli or god knows what? Is it safe to fly? If there is a fire or flood, will there still be a FEMA — or anyone, to help?

Will there be a knock on your door at night, about something you said in public, or online or on your phone?

These are legitimate questions to ask yourself now — and nobody knows the answers.