Donald's New Owner

Morning Dispatch

Nazis of a feather [Photo credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times]

[Substack was down for a while and is still a little glitchy. I hope this reaches you.]

Donald Trump has always been for sale. It used to be shocking how many people were willing to prop him up in the hopes of profiting off his increasingly seamy ventures. But thanks to a morally bankrupt Republican Party and our degraded corporate media, Donald remains alarmingly close to the kind of power that’s worth shelling out massive amounts of money to be close to—and benefit from.

Any person or entity, from Putin to Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf, willing to throw Donald a few bucks for a licensing fee or a Trump Tower condo has gained access and influence. Given this decades-long pattern, it’s not surprising that the world’s richest fascist, South African jumping bean Elon Musk, would also be interested in purchasing a few shares in a man who is willing to sell whatever he can get his hands on—whether it’s steaks or American national security—because he values money more than anything.

In exchange for Donald’s willingness to throw Musk the keys to the federal government, Musk is throwing a considerable fortune, as well as the weight of Twitter’s influence, behind the Republican candidate. For him, it’s a safe bet because he knows, if Donald is elected, he’ll do anything Musk wants him to do.

It is, of course, a devil’s bargain that continues to be made by others, including the aforementioned Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times reported Friday that Musk and Donald speak regularly. Musk has spent at least $140 million on America PAC, a political action committee that supports Donald. Donald has told several people that this amount could balloon to as much as $500 million. According to the Times, Musk, a man with tremendous reach and influence simply by virtue of the fact that he has acquired an obscene amount of wealth, is “all in” with Donald now:

Ensconced in a war room in Pittsburgh with a team of lawyers, public-relations professionals, canvassing experts and longtime friends, Mr. Musk is trying to apply strategies and entrepreneurial lessons from his businesses to a grind-it-out political mission with just weeks to go until Election Day.

It may be impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Mr. Musk is providing to Mr. Trump. This is in part because of his role on X, where he amplifies so much of the former president’s message.

As Benjamin Soskis, a historian of the ultrarich, told the Times, “I’m not sure there is a precedent in modern history to how Musk has inserted himself into a presidential race.”

The most salient part of the Times’ report, not revealed until the tenth paragraph, is that Musk’s financial assistance may not be his biggest contribution to Donald’s election bid. He’s also involved in a concerted effort to keep the American electorate as ignorant as possible. In fact, the Trump campaign is coordinating with Musk in order to suppress or remove stories the campaign finds unflattering or harmful to its mission.

You might remember that there were congressional hearings after Republicans accused Democrats of suppressing information before the last election because they had asked Twitter to clamp down on potentially fabricated stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop. These same Republicans are now cheering on Musk as he spreads inflammatory lies about immigrants and disinformation about the government’s response to the recent hurricanes, in order to put his thumb on the scale for his new pet. 

In his column for the Philadelphia Inquirer this week, Will Bunch asked an important question: “What does the world’s richest man want from Pennsylvania… and America?”

Is it hyperbole to say that the Tesla and SpaceX founder is frantically trying to buy the election on behalf of Donald Trump? This week, the Musk-funded America PAC tweeted (after Musk stole the @America handle from another user) photos of his minions right here in Philadelphia handing out $47 in cash to voters, part of a maybe-legal-but-sketchy-anyway scheme to spread pro-Trump dollars around in critical swing states.

Musk is literally giving money to voters to support Donald, which is yet another reason that no one individual should be allowed to amass the kind of mind-boggling fortune Musk now controls. But that is a conversation for another time.

Separately, Donald and Musk are both dangerous enough. Together, they are in an even stronger position to end American democracy and align this country with the world’s most destructive foreign actors.

When Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (a considerable over-payment that didn’t make any sense at the time), he stated that “for Twitter to deserve the public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” Although that sounded noble, Musk was lying about his intentions.

A couple of weeks ago, he posted this on Twitter :

Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!

This is an egregious lie. Musk’s intentions, however, are crystal clear.