Picture, if you will, the scene in Mar-a-Lago on election night at the moment when it’s become clear that Trump has won. The atmosphere is hysterical. Trump is in expansive form. He stands surrounded by his ghastly tribe of dependants, plus AN Other. In his victory speech, the president-elect praises his campaign staff, his prospective vice-president, and his family. Each gets a few seconds of adulation.
But AN Other gets a whole four minutes. He is Elon Musk, the richest manchild in history. Trump calls him a “super genius”, a “special guy” and a “star”. He has flown straight from Texas in his Gulfstream to bask in the adulation of his new lord and master. He has also paid several hundred million dollars, plus a month of his time, to be here. But now his time has come.
Hold that thought. We will return to it later.
Now imagine what Musk’s peers in Silicon Valley were thinking, as they sat chewing their pencils composing slavish messages of congratulation to The Donald. And believe me, they were toe-curlingly obsequious. All around the valley, though, the prevailing sound was of teeth being gnashed. After all, most of these tech titans had spent months wondering how to curry favour with Trump in case he actually won. And there was Musk, who had done an end-run around them and inserted himself into the heart of the new administration. It must have been maddening.
Spool forward a few days and we find that it gets worse: Trump has chosen Musk and a wannabe titan, Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a “department of government efficiency” (or “Doge”, after Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin), thereby putting the two dudes in charge of a concerted effort to slash rules, bureaucracy and spending throughout the federal government. “Together, these two wonderful Americans,” declared their new boss, “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Presumably he was impressed by Musk’s claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the government’s $6.8tn budget, and by Ramaswamy’s promise, made during his failed campaign for the Republican nomination, to eliminate the FBI, the Department of Education and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Although this new outfit is called a “department”, it won’t actually be a government agency. If it were, Musk would have innumerable conflicts of interest that would cause legal difficulties if he started slashing the regulators with which he is currently in conflict. These include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Also, last year his various companies had $3bn worth of government contracts from 17 federal agencies. But if he’s “outside” the system, he’ll be freer to slash and burn as he likes.
In 2018, the writer Michael Lewis published The Fifth Risk, a remarkable book examining the implications of Trump’s political appointments in his first term, especially with respect to three government agencies: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce. The book, Lewis explained, was a product of his own desire to find out what branches of the government that never make the headlines actually do. And he found that what they do largely involves keeping people and society safe.
If Musk’s past behaviour is anything to go by, such concern with safety will cut little ice. After he had been forced by a Delaware court to proceed with his purchase of Twitter, the first thing he did was to fire 6,500 people – about 80% of the staff, by his own reckoning. And those dismissed included people whose job was to moderate content on the platform and keep it relatively “safe”. After they’d gone, the platform was opened to all-comers, which is why it has degenerated into a toxic sewer of anti-woke fanatics, white supremacists, misogynists, conspiracy theorists and other inhabitants of alternative universes. He also tweaked the platform’s algorithms to prioritise his own posts to its 200 million users, thus in effect giving him a broadcast medium for his political views and preferences.
Musk’s strategy, once he decided to back Trump, was to go all-in, much as he did years ago when the production of the Tesla Model 3 was running into trouble and he claimed to have slept in the factory for weeks. He moved to Pennsylvania for the last month of the campaign and was active on the ground every day, energising campaigners and generally raising the campaign’s profile, especially in rural areas.
In other words, he made himself indispensable to Trump, and therein lies what may come to be his problem. Narcissists do not like to be under an obligation to anyone, no matter how useful they have been. Thomas Cromwell made himself indispensable to Henry VIII in the 1530s and – as viewers of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light are soon to discover – ultimately that was not a great career move. History may not repeat itself, but this time, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, it might just rhyme.
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What I’ve been reading
The narrow path from despair
Diane Coyle’s beautifully succinct review on Enlightenment Economics of Sam Freedman’s book Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It.
Congratulations, boss
The Verge’s compilation of all the nauseatingly obsequious messages sent by tech titans to the president-elect.
Reason to carry on
A really good argument from 404 Media – Why the work still matters under Trump – for why honest journalism is needed now more than ever.