We’re so caught up in the awfulness of the Trump 2.0 debacle that we frequently fail to stop and smell the roses, translating that democracy had a tremendous victory early last month when Democratic candidate Susan Crawford beat out the MAGA candidate for a judgeship in Wisconson. And we must not forget that. Crawford flamed her opponent by ten points, and this in a state that Trump carried in 2024, albeit barely. It was a grand victory at the time, not simply because it proved the fact that not all elections can be bought (only most of them) but it also served to put several nails in Elon Musk’s coffin.
“He’s finished, done, gone. He polls terrible. People hate him,” said a GOP operative who was granted anonymity to speak frankly. “He’d go to Wisconsin thinking he can buy people’s votes, wear the cheese hat, act like a 9-year-old. … It doesn’t work. It’s offensive to people,” says a Politico article. The tales of Musk’s political demise are debated and some claim are greatly exaggerated. Many people claim that Musk may be in a temporary eclipse but don’t be surprised when he’s back out there in the full sunlight. I don’t think there will be a comeback for Musk. He went way too far, too fast, with jumping up and down at Trump’s rallies, waving the chainsaw at CPAC and donning the cheesehat in Wisconsin. The act got old very quickly because it was never that good to begin with. It was ketamine-fueled foppery and excess and played out that way from the outset.
Even Trump took fourteen years on TV to cement his fantasy image in the nation’s psyche and a lot of people forget that. They think they’re going to show up on the political scene, act batshit, and be the next Trump. Wrong. Trump is a unique figure, highly unlikely to ever reoccur again in our politics, both because of his hubris born out of stunning ignorance, and the way he played the media his entire life, not to mention his extreme wealth. We will not see his like again, and that is a profound blessing. Rick Wilson has written a lengthy piece on this matter of the downfall of Musk. Here are excerpts:
Elon misunderstood the rules. He thought proximity to Trump was power. It is—but only the kind that corrodes, not builds. Investing $300 million in Trump’s reelection and dumping untold millions into Wisconsin Supreme Court races made him a threat, sure. A valuable asset for Trump to strike fear into the hearts of unbelievers. Republican senators lost sleep imagining Elon bankrolling their primary challengers just for fun. For him, $20 million is a couch cushion change, they reasoned, and raced to cast Cabinet votes for incompetents, drunks, lunatics, and open fascists on Elon’s command.
But power like that still obeys political gravity—and makes enemies. Musk’s bluster and Silicon Valley smash-and-grab arrogance might work in tech boardrooms, but Washington is a different game. It still runs on ego, fear, and institutional inertia. The federal government isn’t just some bloated appendage you amputate with a Doge-branded hatchet. It’s a Byzantine machine of turf wars, slow-roll revenge, and procedural chokeholds. Musk didn’t just touch the system—he declared war on it.
And worse, he did it publicly.
He played the fool with a flamethrower. He tried to be a disruptor, when what Washington respects is the guy who breaks kneecaps in private and smiles for the cameras. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Russ Vought, more evil and more subtle, plays the game better than Sissy SpaceX.
Instead, Elon sent out his grotesque little army of online incels, catamites, criminallyy-adjacent weirdos, and lost boys, those “obviously smart but terminally stupid” Silicon Valley man-children—to swing axes at programs that actually help people, not woke boogeymen. Not DEI offices, but veteran outreach, infrastructure maintenance, Medicare, Medicaid, USAID, firefighters, forest rangers, food inspectors, air safety experts, nuclear security officers, food programs—the invisible, basic services staffed by low-paid, high-integrity public servants.
He didn’t look like a reformer. He looked like a vandal with a superiority complex and a botched penis enlargement.
Now the backlash is coming, and it’s coming hard: DOGE is wildly unpopular, the cuts Musk made are deeply unpopular, and the damage is spreading to GOP elected officials. Now, they feel more anger than fear when his name is mentioned.
His halo is cracked, and the myth of genius is bleeding out into the open. Elon once imagined himself as Tony Stark, the philosopher-CEO astride the Earth. Instead, he’s looking more like Icarus—only with worse branding and a troll army instead of wings. The most pernicious form is one Elon doesn’t see coming: attacks from low-level MAGA staffers at the FAA, NASA, and DOD who will try to curry White House favor by ensuring they make Elon’s path a little more rocky. To show Trump they’re onside, you know.
He’ll try to find a way back in—if only to keep killing off regulations that impede his various enterprises, and because the attention of being Presidential Bestie is like a ketamine-crack slushie. It won’t be easy. He committed the unforgivable sin of making Trump look bad. He made the MAGA GOP vulnerable. He was arrogant, even for a rich guy. He made mistake after mistake, allowing the courts to undo and unwind his illegal actions. His farewell visit to the Gulf states was as one a dozens of CEOs, not as Co-President.
Worst of all, he’s deeply unpopular. For Trump, who believes in a kind of fame-by-association sympathetic magic, Elon is now a loser. Less of a man. An intern who just helped out for a few weeks. A coffee boy. He barely even knew his name.
You know the drill. You’ve seen it a hundred times.
Yes, we have. Coffee boy demotion to obscurity time. How the mighty have fallen as they predictably do in Trump world. And it’s not just Trump. Politico reports that “polling from Data for Progress in late April found most voters wanted Musk out of government at the end of his 130-day period as a special employee that’s set to expire at the end of in May — or even sooner.” The end of May is ten days away. Musk is nowhere near the pinnacle of fantasy and power that he held a mere four months ago. Thank God.
It’s doubtlessly hard on Musk. People who knew him said that he completely loved the non stop media attention when he had it, following Trump around like a puppy. It’s got to be tough to go back into the shadows after being the center of attention. But again, it proves up not only ETTD, but another adage: there are only certain things that money can buy because the best things in life are free. Yes, Musk could put together his own TV show if he wanted, hell, he could build his own network. But if nobody watches? That’s the part you cannot buy. And Musk is finding out the hard way.
The harder they come…the harder they fall…one and all. Jimmy Cliff
The highly-esteemed Rick Wilson nailed it in one line: Musk’s raison d’etre as a Trumpler sidekick/mentor was “killing off regulations that impede his various enterprises.” And firing all the dedicated public servants who staffed those institutions he targeted. Basically he removed all threats from the honest side of government, so he can keep stealing money from the taxpayers. Trump took Musk’s donations and allowed the goof onstage with him, even in the Oval Office, where Elon’s overdose of publicity led him to upstage Donald, a sin for which he’s paying now. I suspect he’ll still be around, thanks to his money, but his day in the sun has gone.
Not now even the coffee boy – or even the covfefe boy.
He just went to the Middle East with trump, he’s not gone.