The Witness Chronicles, 4/2/25
A fool and his money
Musk Got Stomped in Wisconsin, Despite His Cheesehead Hat
Money isn’t everything, nor is authoritarianism
The Trump team took a big hit tonight. Despite Musk throwing millions in graft around, their guy lost. And it is going to be interesting to see how this reverberates. I don’t think it will be pretty.
They put him out there in Wisconsin as their point man with his bottomless wallet, and he failed. Maybe it was that dance with the cheese hat. Maybe it was those big checks he tried to use to bribe voters. Frankly, that was clueless. Beyond clueless. It was game show shit. Idiocy.
And it failed.
And Elon Musk failed, big time. Trump is known for discarding losers and Elon just lost big. And that loss was a Trump loss, which we know does not go well with Don. He does not like losers. And this is not Elon’s first loss. Tesla is getting slaughtered in the Markets. And ridiculed in public.
On Saturday the first major national protest against what Trump and Musk are doing will take place, the Hands Off rally. I’m going, but this feels too little and too late, though this major loss may power it up. And a lot of friends are sharing the info about the protest. I just turned seventy, so those people are not your typical protestors.
And we are not old hippies. That generation is done, relevance-wise. But I will be looking at the people there and hoping they are not just my contemporaries. The interesting thing about older protesters is their politics and there are more that are not entirely partisan. Things like taking away Veteran benefits and threatening Medicaid are not making people happy.
The Trump people have had three months. And they may be reaching the point where their actions start to catch up with them. But they may be too arrogant to understand that. Trump certainly is.
The resistance movement has been glacially slow in getting going and that has benefited Trump, who, in contrast, has been moving as fast as possible to destroy the fabric of our democracy. Those who oppose him seem to have been frozen in shock or are still thinking this was democracy as we have always known it. It is not and we need to step on the gas.
Cory Booker took an old route yesterday, speaking on the floor of the Senate for 25 hours and five minutes straight with no breaks. It was a symbolic protest but it was a protest, one of the few we have seen from elected Democrats, to their shame.
But there is a major problem, in my view, with all of this. Trump is past caring about protests. He has gone all in with his attempt to take over and destroy the federal government, not because he sees a better way but because he is out for vengeance and will do whatever it takes to get it.
This afternoon he will announce something he is calling Liberation Day. It is assumed he will announce massive tariffs despite the reality that they are already ruining the economy. If Trump has truly gone off the rails, as I believe, he doesn’t really care about their effect on the American people.
The liberation he speaks of is his own. He is liberated from any oversight, any guardrails, any repercussions for his actions. Look at the scope of the damage he is doing every day. Deporting citizens who have done nothing except for the accident of being from another country and being non-white. Randomly taking apart our healthcare regulations, destroying the future of farming, leaving the country in peril from devasting storms, filling military leadership with incompetent fanatics- the list goes on and on.
Yes we should be protesting, all of us. The election in Wisconsin, a state he carried in the last election, was won by ten points. Two House elections in Florida were won by Republicans as expected but by a far lower margin than Trump won those two districts. These are good indicators of what the midterms might look like next year. But the question is, and I am serious, is will we make it to next year? Will the makeup of the Congress mean anything with a dictator in place and the current Congress capitulating to his every wish?
I know, I’m sounding a bit hysterical but maybe we need a little hysteria to wake people up. This isn’t right and has not been right from day one on January 20th. Heather Cox Richardson, a leading voice of reason in the resistance, was blocked from posting on Facebook yesterday, a blatant act of censorship by Mark Zuckerberg, yet another American oligarch revealing his true self.
They are coming out of the woodwork these days, no longer pretending they are just businessmen. They have their money but now they want more. They want power. But Elon Musk’s antics in Wisconsin were the acts of a fool and they finally backfired on him.
That’s a start. We will see what happens on Saturday. Will a protest bring people out and who will they be? Personally I’m too close to this stuff to have any perspective on how angry the majority is. But the election in Wisconsin yesterday tells me something about that reality, something we all needed to hear.
People are paying attention.
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Martin Edic
65 years old here. Will be protesting in the blazing sun here in deep red FL. I hope it will be a big turnout nationwide.
Elon Musk’s Redemption: 1. Get out of Government completely. 2. Sell Tesla, preferably to an American car company like Ford or General Motors. 3. Spend all his time, energy, and money on Space X. I am a space advocate and I feel this would be a great contribution to humanity. If he wants to build a city on Mars, fine!