The Witness Chronicles, 2/8/25

Smoke and mirrors, Trump and Musk

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash

Smokescreens: The Brilliant Crudity of Trump and Musk

Look at what they actually do, not what they say

Gaza as a high end beach resort, high rise condos and all. It dominated the news conversation and it was complete baloney, but it was the kind of baloney Trump excells at. And so does Elon Musk, a man whose tweets can dominate the news cycle before they disappear into nowhere. And these two strange men found each other and found they share this ability to blow smoke and get headlines.

It’s an unholy alliance and that unholy alliance is currently running our government, if you can still call it that. These guys didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, they brought a bazooka. And the strategy is smash things with sledgehammers and, in the meantime, slip the really dangerous stuff in during the chaos.

Chaos is not the only weapon in their quiver. There is political fear, fear that is paralyzing anyone in the Republican Party who might question the stuff that’s going on. Watching the Friday night pundits on PBS offers a great example of all of this. They are smart people with tons of experience in DC, yet they are still talking about things like the Gaza real estate deal that is not happening and never was.

Musk and Trump are controlling the news cycle and that control is masterful in comparison to anything the Democrats and the supposed ‘resistance’ are doing, which is nothing. With the exception of a few people like Representative Jamie Raskin, the silence on the left is deafening; weak chatter and flimsy outrage.

There are voices over here but we are competing with geniuses of managing the dialog. It’s really hard for me to put Donald Trump and any form of genius in the same sentence, but is applies here. I actually think he is better at it than Musk, whose judgement is nonexistent, maybe because of his openly racist Afrikaner upbringing as a child of extreme privelege.

Add in his money and he has no reason to care what anyone anywhere thinks of him. That’s where the sieg heil he threw out to the crowd on national television came from. He knows there are a lot of people out there that admire the sheer moxie of an act like that. Trump knows the same thing about weak or lazy people.

This is a new level in American politics but it has always been out there. Take the Joseph McCarthy communist witch-hunts in the 1950s. The same attorney that advised McCarthy, Roy Cohn, was an early mentor to Donald Trump, a direct connection connecting historical events over seventy years ago to events this week.

This is where I am struck by my reading of history and how it is unfolding in real time, as we watch this extremely strange political theater run in parallel, except that it is supercharged by modern communications’ ubiquitous existence.

There is nothing new under the sun. I know that AI is viewed by a generation right now as the biggest breakthrough in history. Well, for my generation, the explosion of the internet was our game changer. Then there were cell phones, another insanely powerful change in society. They were liberation, and that is not an exaggeration. Imagine having to wait at home for a call.

Unimaginable. And unimaginable is where we are right now in politics and what Trump and Musk are leveraging every minute of every day and doing it masterfully.

The other skill they are wielding is the fantasy that billionaires are some kind of advanced version of humans. Trump learned that lesson early after inheriting great wealth and creating a mythological version of himself on a reality TV show, The Apprentist. Polls showed that many of his MAGA followers actually thought that show was real.

With Musk it was the extraordinary theater his SpaceX launches provided. I won’t denigrate those accomplishments, they are groundbreaking, especially after we watched NASA for years fail to accomplish much of anything. Maybe not fair, but Musk leveraged that perspective and made himself into a genius. Which his biographies do not support.

‘Opportunist’ may be a better description and now he is at the pinnacle of power.

I think the broad question now is where are the big personalities in the opposition? And what are they really doing while we are distracted by this bullshit? As the subhead says, look at what they do, not what they say. Trump is about to unleash his junior nerds on the Pentagon, the most powerful agency on the planet.

Do we really want 19 year olds accessing military data? They are likely to think this is some kind of video game, when in fact it is the lifeblood of our democracy, our ability to defend ourselves and the things we believe in.

And that’s the big problem. These people do not believe in anything that is not related to their personal agendas. There are no ideals at work here, and if you believe there are, you are simply a chump being played. You might want to think about that, given the stakes.

Or maybe not. That’s easier.

I’m waiting for something to close down platforms like Substack, which is where you are reading this. Musk knows about these places and he has the idiot’s ear. There could be a day where this gets shut down with no warning and I disappear. And a lot of us disappear.

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Martin Edic