The Witness Chronicles, 2/21/25
Musk’s scam and naive farmers
The King and His Executioner
Trump is Sitting Back and Letting Musk Do the Dirty Work
Donald Trump is basically lazy and super sensitive to any criticism, which explains why we have Elon Musk still throwing chainsaws around in the White House. Musk is Trump’s popularity insurance policy. He will take the fall when things get bad for them, which may be sooner than you think.
It’s a guessing game in DC when this bromance loses its spark and Musk wears out his welcome. But right now he is too valuable to drop, as he slashes and burns in the name of cost cutting. There is a pattern emerging. As Trump’s minions, like Stephen Miller, go public with lies and exaggerations about the numbers on various TV shows, Trump sits back and repeats those numbers, with the caveat that ‘this is what they’re telling me’.
Not that he knows they are true but that he has been told they are true. And that means if he is ever legally confronted with lying he can throw the blame on ‘they’. It’s his game book from an entire life of lying and it has worked pretty well. But I have to wonder who is the stooge this time around?
As Musk and his gamers get access to government databases, including the ability to change those databases, power at the top will shift and Trump may find himself at their mercy. That is because that data represents the levers of power in the federal government.
Knowledge is power, as the maxim says, and the collective knowledge of the country is held in those mystifying chains of numbers and letters. Everything from defense secrets to personal information on every citizen and every business in the country. Accessing them is the biggest power grab in human history, the keys to the kingdom.
And Elon Musk is acutely aware of that. It is becoming obvious that this was his game plan from the get go. Trump, like most grifters, is inherently a sucker himself, willing to believe anything that shows him as a winner and others as losers. We are seeing it as Vladimir Putin manipulated him into betraying Ukraine by simply pretending Trump will get credit for ending the war.
That only took a couple of phone calls. When a man like Trump is such an easy mark, it attracts opportunists like Musk and the others enabling this ongoing rape of the most powerful country in the world, which is the only realistic way to understand what they are really up to.
Obviously, Musk is not after money. This is about power and mental illness. He believes his way is always the better way and will do anything to demonstrate that, including shifting gears from semi-liberal to shilling for neo-Nazis. Whatever it takes.
Am I being excessive in this assessment? Not if you are paying attention. And that is the disease in this country that got us here, willful ignorance. In today’s Washington Post there is a cover story about farmers, who are still Trump supporters, facing bankruptcy over the cuts in ag support in just the past few weeks.
For some inexplicable reason they continue to voice support for a man who has betrayed them on a scale few can imagine, literally killing the markets for their products and screwing them out of money the government had contractually guaranteed them, money already spent on capital improvements.
These are not stupid people, they are business owners, and those businesses are considerable operations. They are not hayseeds in overalls with pitchforks, as some Dems still seem to think (another huge problem). But their willingness to give the man scamming them out of their life savings the benefit of the doubt is mystifying.
It’s not just the farmers, there’s a lot of that going around right now, the denial and that willful ignorance. Both Trump and Musk know it and they count on it. But it is a flimsy platform to build a kingdom on. Start messing with the grassroots and you might ignite a revolution, something the Republican Party fails to understand.
The hope here lies not in liberal protests taking to the streets or nut cases trying to take potshots at their perceived enemies. The hope is that people who voted for him wake up and realize they have been scammed royally. The problem with that is that no one likes to admit they are suckers, which explains this denial and continued loyalty.
That’s another aspect of human nature both Trump and Musk know well. But there can be a tipping point where too far is too far and we may see it in the next few weeks as the right struggles to pass a budget that is totally unrealistic, the ‘big beautiful’ bill the House is proposing that includes virtually everything Trump wants and that would bankrupt the country.
In proposing this monstrosity, the Republicans have offered the Democrats an opportunity to reveal the truth about all this cost cutting talk: that it is just a smokescreen for the ultimate power grab. Of course there are huge cost cuts that need to be made, and that would be a worthy goal, if that was the actual goal. But this haphazard gutting of essential functions with no plan to replace them is not cost cutting.
It is a distraction but at heart a weak one. The weakness is that it is directly hurting millions of Americans, including people you and I know, and it is doing it right now. When the shock wears off, there is going to be a lot of anger. The weakness in their plan is that they don’t care about people. But people care about people and people are what a country and democracy are made of.
We can only hope the people wake up and realize they have power. I know, it’s a lot to ask, but that’s my hope. It should be shared by all of us.
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Martin Edic
Heather Cox Richardson’s quote of James Marriott - London Times - nailed it:
“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable,” Marriott writes. “Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it.“
….
I have observed the same for some time. Few alive have lived through the Depression. Only soldiers, and many immigrants, have experienced war since our Civil War, nor famine or massive deaths of communicable diseases since the 1930s; many of those who did vowed never to let their children suffer.
This is what happens when our histories are glossed over….
It’s hard to believe that these people who are hurt will still support what’s going on. But I don’t understand how Christians can support this man either. It’s a crazy world.