Kayfabe

For one day at least social media was a wonderful thing.

Trump and Musk broke up spectacularly, in the middle of Pride Month no less, and took to exchanging snarky barbs about each other via their own social media platforms, with every US news network except Fox covering the thing in real time, like a prizefight. Fox seemed, to use a quote Abraham Lincoln applied to one of his Civil War generals after getting thrashed in battle, “confused and stunned like a duck hit over the head”, and for a while their lead story was a pet zebra who escaped and was running along a highway near Nashville. But after a while even they caved, although their coverage was about what you’d expect from Fox….casting Trump as the jilted lover and Musk as the two-timing ungrateful whore who was probably a lib all along. Whatever. It was all great fun in the same way professional wrestling is great fun, and I hope the feud drags out as long as the one between Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik.

With enough ketamine in his system I could see Musk tweeting….

“I put you in camel clutch and break your neck you orange face Jabroni!”

I need not reiterate the back of forth of it all. Two drug-addled billionaires with the combined emotional maturity of a fossilized pile of dog shit spewing venom at each other through what former Senator Ted Stevens once described as a “series of tubes”. I haven’t had this much fun on the internet since I discovered Napster. Musk spent $290 million of his fortune helping Trump get elected, and for a while it looked like money well spent. He made it back and then some. He looked and was treated like a co-President, leading his pack of high school kids through Washington DC like a throng of marauding Vikings, promising to uncover all sorts of waste, fraud, and abuse. He was gonna save $2 trillion dollars. But after a while people started noticing that, like that guy in the movie “Office Space”, he was always doing things like putting the decimal in the wrong place (or in once case, confusing “b” with “m”), and just about everything he breathlessly uncovered was almost instantly debunked. Eight billion became $8 million. It was that sort of thing. He became the RFK Jr of fraud.

By April he settled for $150 billion in promised savings, but even that number was wildly exaggerated. In the end, his DOGE will surely end up costing taxpayers more than they saved, the type of bureaucratic boondoggle that drives people like Rand Paul crazy. But Musk did end up crippling the agencies that were investigating his own businesses, so he had that going for him, which is nice.

Despite all this, Musk’s bros still love him. Musk leads a cult almost as obsessive as Trump’s, and for a while the two merged into a sort of super-cell of angry white dudes who couldn’t afford eggs but were willing to finance a Tesla. It seemed the political equivalent of the NWO.

But as astronaut Jim Lovell once said, “Houston we have a problem….”

A twitter user put it even more succinctly.

“Which man gets custody of Joe Rogan?”

MAGA vs the tech-bros.

For now at least, it seems the MAGAs are in the lead. Tesla stock took a $152 billion dollar shit in the midst of the spat….or about $9 billion per tweet. Republican lawmakers might adore Musk, but they genuinely fear Trump, who could have any one of them running to hire private security with a single social media missive. I suspect Musk will soon be walking back on some of his threats, if only because the US government is his biggest customer. Trump’s broadsides against Musk were interesting, but, for him at least, muted. He still seems more pissed off at Taylor Swift and Robert DeNiro. The man who a few months ago tweeted that “I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man” is gonna be hard to quit, after all. Trump recently promised to look into a pardon for P Diddy because “he used to like me”. The man can be suckered into anything as long as you play to his vanity. The only person alive who does this better than Musk in Vladimir Putin.

Trump and Musk are both narcissistic assholes. But only one is dumb.

Not that Musk in a genius. The bar, as you may have noticed, is quite low these days. By all accounts Musk can read and write, two things nobody ever suggested Trump was able to do. Musk HAD to know that everything Trump touches dies. The man is a walking Chernobyl.

What happened was inevitable. As is their re-unification.

For now, embrace the kayfabe.

In a bit….

—tf