Elon Musk is learning a primary rule of politics, one that he never learned as a titan of industry, master of the universe sort of guy: and that is that when you’re talking to employees or “lessers” they will buy anything that you say. After all, you’re signing the paycheck. So that makes you a demi god, at least for the moment. And any knee jerk commentary you come up with, any off hand idea is lauded as brilliant. But in politics, you’re only as good as your last victory and right now Musk has yet to present a single victory, let alone a good one that he can sail along on for a while.
You read here earlier today that Musk has been defenestrated and the big question is “why?” Let’s use Occam’s Razor. Karoline Leavitt lays it on the line in no uncertain terms that Musk’s big “find” was nothing of the sort.
So I asked Grok if lots of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. The answer in part: “It’s a problem that the SSA acknowledges and tries to mitigate, but it's not indicative of systemic fraud or mismanagement at a massive scale.”
Has anyone broken the news to MAGA? pic.twitter.com/2pv7bmy31h— MikeBates (@MikeBates) February 18, 2025
That is most likely what happened in the past 12 hours or so. Trump is a creature of television and while he was out at the race on Sunday and golfing Monday (and he’s also golfing today, FYI) he got wind of the uproar over the threat to Social Security checks. And of course Musk’s lie about people dead for fifty years receiving checks simply holds no water, whatsoever.
But it gets a lot worse than that for Elon. What can be worse than the Marmalade Monarch’s wrath? The wrath of MAGA. And Steve Bannon has been stoking the flames of that particular conflagration for some time now, “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,” he [Bannon] said during an interview with the website UnHerd. “He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”
Shazam. That’s not going to go over well. Bannon has also told MAGA that Musk is not to be trusted and has argued there is a “fundamental chasm” between the billionaires who have aligned themselves with the president and his “Make America Great Again” movement. This is pretty strong language. And the bottom line is that Musk can’t fight the Trump White House, MAGA, and the American public, with only the golfing titular *president* on his side and everybody else devoted to eating him alive.
And it’s well established that Trump will fold to his advisors and do what he needs to do to keep MAGA happy and the grift machine going. That’s an essential. After all, nobody is going to offer Melania forty million bucks to do a movie unless they’re getting something from Trump in return. A lot of something. Right now Musk is only rocking the MAGA vote and not delivering on any of his crazy promises.
Which leads us to another thing that Musk needs to learn about politics: the only person who can make crazy promises and not deliver on them is Donald. For anybody else, that action merely triggers a walk through the door, back into obscurity.
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well, from personal experience, when my husband died, I notified social security, where I was told I needed to send back that month’s check he had received, so I highly doubt that there are zillions of dollars paid to all those 150 year olds.