Thanks for reading Life, Liberty, Property! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
President-elect Elon Musk, along with a conservative influencer based in Florida (Donald Trump), successfully prevented Congress from passing a big new budget, even though Speaker Mike Johnson was good with it. Speaker Johnson, who looks and talks like a Boy Scout, had made it just perfect, he thought: The budget had enough handouts for red states and for blue states. It was perfectly seasoned with scams, delicately balanced with corruption. The ears were marked. It was ready to go.
Then these hooligans came in and threw it in the air. “Congress should only get a raise when the budget is balanced,” posted President Musk, amid rapid-fire replies to various right-wing X accounts of varying levels of insanity— which is now just called the legislative process.
After that awkward attempt at satire, Bowles immediately moves on to the inevitable Trump-is-stupid part:
While Elon, the President-Elect-by-Vibes, is successfully revamping the entire U.S. government’s budget, Donald Trump is also doing important things.
Brilliant activity for him, guys. The perfect Trump quagmire topic. This involves so many parties. It’s both important to everyone and important to no one. I’m pretty sure he means “make daylight saving permanent,” but whatever. Elon’s going to be in a complex transaction with Xi Jinping, trading Maine for a new city in Heilongjiang province, while Trump is still just Truthing hard about daylight saving time.
This new framing of Donald Trump marks a jarringly abrupt U-turn from the media’s calumniation of him as a dangerous, fascistic, modern-day Hitler. Now Trump is supposedly an inept, impulsive, scatterbrained, easily manipulable schlub under the spell of the evil mastermind Elon Musk. The left has realized—fully eight years on—that much of the public generally likes Trump and a majority now approve of him as a president and expect him to do much good.
Confronting that impediment to their hoped-for destruction of the incoming Trump administration, the leaders of the left have cleverly (so they think) decided to create an alternative boogieman in Musk. Their plan is to work with the fact that Musk is obviously some sort of genius, astoundingly successful, and a visionary, spinning it into a myth that he is an aspiring dictator and a dire threat to all that is good, decent, and sexually liberating in the United States and indeed the entire world. That was, of course, their characterization of Trump until he won reelection despite their prodigious eight-year effort to demonize him.
So, ex-Hitler is now just an eccentric, doddering old-timer chasing rainbows and posting to his social media account about trivial obsessions while “President Musk” takes over the United States and steers us into catastrophe to satisfy his massive greed and monumentally egotistical will to power. If the people have (unaccountably, foolishly, and disappointingly) warmed to Trump, then the left will work with that. Trump: nice guy, but overmatched, disengaged, and way out of his depth.
Interestingly, this pivot fits perfectly with my adage that if the left complains about something nefarious the right is supposedly planning to do, those on the left are already doing it themselves. Here we have the people who covered up for a senile Joe Biden for more than four years while a small group of White House insiders used him as a desiccated sock puppet, and they are now pretending that his incoming replacement is a mentally incompetent stooge for a Svengali-like, un-American, master manipulator.
Biden was brilliant and then suddenly was not. Trump was omnipotent and now suddenly is not.
This absurdly abrupt about-face clearly smacks of desperation and is thoroughly unlikely to succeed. The notion of Donald Trump, former Hitler and aspiring wielder of unprecedented power, being anyone’s ventriloquist dummy is patently preposterous.
Of course, the absurdity of an idea never stops the left from trying.
