Will Musk be the next Trump?

[Tero]

How is anything just now? Trump is out to destroy the USA. Because the USA was mean to him. Tesla owners will just need to file insurance. Musk coulde save Tesla by quitting Trump.

[Cunt]

Trump is out to deliver to his voters.

It's 'The Democracy' he is protecting. Burning teslas is terrorism, and an example of extreme left-wing violence. Also known as their go-to political strategy.

[Tero]

Trump is out to deliver to his voters.

It's 'The Democracy' he is protecting. Burning teslas is terrorism, and an example of extreme left-wing violence. Also known as their go-to political strategy.

His voters are 20% of the citizens. Do I need to explain this more? Other than that the Trump government is deleting contacts the gov't is responsible for. Mr Musk's PR problem is no concern to the general population. Let him figure out why they are trashing his cars.

[Tero]

There are a lot of lawsuits and a lot of moving parts. But best I can tell, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Theodore Chuang of the federal district of Maryland was the first time any judge has directly addressed the illegality of Musk’s appointment as head of DOGE and then ordered his actions unwound.

Specifically, Judge Chuang, in a 68-page preliminary injunction, blasted the illegal appointment of Musk, ruled the ensuing shutdown of USAID by DOGE illegal, and barred Musk and DOGE from any further work at USAID.

A lot has happened since Musk first took the reins at DOGE, so to understand the impact of this order—specifically what it does and does not do within USAID and how it might have ripple effects in other cases—it’s useful to go back in time to the beginning of February, when Musk and DOGE first started taking a chainsaw to the federal government.

One of the most important parts of Judge Chuang’s ruling confirms that the administration tried to have it both ways with Musk.

On the one hand, there Musk was, with DOGE members already inside of an agency, bragging about how he had destroyed it in the course of a weekend. Musk made public statements and posts claiming he had firm control over DOGE, and Trump even praised Musk for this in his joint address to Congress.

In addition to the “wood chipper” post, Judge Chuang noted that Musk wrote in February that it was time for USAID to “die” and that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down.

On the other hand, the government tried to argue that Musk was only serving in some kind of advisory rather than official role. Government attorneys have argued in many cases that Musk does not have formal authority to make government decisions, and therefore he didn’t need to have been formally appointed by Trump and officially confirmed by the Senate.

When pressed as to who was actually in charge of DOGE then, the White House claimed last month that a woman named Amy Gleason, who worked for DOGE’s predecessor, was its acting administrator.

The fact is, the government has been DOGE-ing the truth for weeks about who was really in charge. Everyone knew and bragged that it was Elon Musk, but that actually created a legal problem because of the pesky Appointments Clause. So they apparently filed false affidavits with the courts to try and backfill the position with someone who was never in charge of it, and then they got caught.

If a president could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisors go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.

Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.

Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.

If Elon Musk is, as Judge Chuang has ruled, the effective head of DOGE, and his position and consequential actions as an effective agency head requires him to have been formally appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, then this will help other litigants in other cases put an immediate stop to what DOGE is doing currently. That could gum things up for Musk, who would suddenly lack the power to slash and burn the government using just his team of hackers.

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/stand- ... irect=true

[Tero]

"Your cars are burning, your stock is in freefall, your sales collapsing, and China is coming to eat your lunch. And all you can do is whimper like the world owes you something. You did this. You ran your mouth, turned your brand into a fascist circle jerk, alienated normal people, and now the reckoning is here. You are not a genius, not a victim, not misunderstood. You are a self-inflicted disaster. And the worst part? You’ll go down still believing you were the hero. "2/2
https://www.threads.net/@grapeylyle/pos ... RCbLESIMvg

[Tero]

Bad people who lost fraudulent benefits are trashing Teslas:
“It turns out when you take away people’s, you know, the money that they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset,” he said. “And they basically wanna kill me because I’m stopping their fraud and they wanna hurt Tesla because we’re stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government. And, well, I guess they’re bad people. Bad people do bad things.”
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/they-basica ... -him-down/

[Cunt]

Trump is out to deliver to his voters.

It's 'The Democracy' he is protecting. Burning teslas is terrorism, and an example of extreme left-wing violence. Also known as their go-to political strategy.

His voters are 20% of the citizens. Do I need to explain this more? Other than that the Trump government is deleting contacts the gov't is responsible for. Mr Musk's PR problem is no concern to the general population. Let him figure out why they are trashing his cars.

Your math seems a bit...motivated.

As to 'figuring out' why they are trashing his cars - it's because they are leftists, and violent threats to the political opposition is how they organize. It's called respecting a diversity of tactics.

[pErvinalia]

When the opposition is kind of fascisty, different tactics are required.

[L'Emmerdeur]

When the opposition is kind of fascisty, different tactics are required.

Circumventing the constitutional order of checks and balances, grabbing unilateral power and behaving as if it's unanswerable, that's looking to go beyond 'kind of' in my opinion. It remains to be seen whether the US is really going to let Trump suspend the law of the land in favor of his and Musk's whims. So far they've had mostly fair sailing aside from the pesky lawsuits.

As for tactics, there are excitable boys and girls who'll do just about anything for a thrill. Regarding the Tesla vandalism, many have a political motive but for some mayhem is reason enough in itself. Might be early stirrings, or just a puerile and futile gesture in the direction of resistance.

Looking ahead, if the Trumpists choose to ignore the courts there'll be some objections. Significant cuts to social services to help offset bigger tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, that could push things along. If the objections get too widespread and obstreperous I think Trump may try to deploy the military. He's already expressed a desire to do just that.

At which point it will depend on whether the military brass are willing to let him toss the Posse Comitatus Act aside. They've taken an oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the US against against all enemies, foreign or domestic' Of note: The enlisted military's oath includes a clause about obeying orders from the president and officers, but the officers' oath does not include that clause. Though of course following orders from the president is understood, in place of that clause the officers' oath hammers home 'faith and allegiance' to the Constitution.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice includes the duty to disobey 'If the order is "contrary to the constitution" or "the laws of the United States."' Many of them take that seriously but without a doubt there are also MAGA true believers in the officer corps. It's possible we'll learn how that plays out.

[Cunt]

As for tactics, there are excitable boys and girls who'll do just about anything for a thrill. Regarding the Tesla vandalism, many have a political motive but for some mayhem is reason enough in itself.

It's only the left who will excuse political violence such as vandalism.

Some of them will even try to pretend that the 'BLM' riots were not the left.

It's like Schroedingers left!

You never know which side is violent, or what their real motives were

[Tero]

Musk and Ayn Rand:

A central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem. Musk’s arrogance, his apparent conviction that he is the main character of history on a quest to take humanity to Mars, may seem like an overabundance of self-esteem. But Musk is a classic showboat. He demands that he be the center of attention in all that he does. It’s clear by now that part of why Musk bought Twitter was so that he could both be the protagonist of the internet and compel the world to see what he thinks is worth seeing. Musk’s compulsive attention-seeking is a sign not of self-esteem but of a desperate need for external validation. This is a man who cheats at video games to look impressive.
(Clip)
This brings us to the inconvenient fact that Musk is unquestionably a looter in Rand’s schema. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, and Tesla has only been able to stay solvent with government assistance. One might forgive this in the interest of ramping up electric vehicle production in order to replace internal-combustion vehicles. But Musk uses his coziness with the state as an economic weapon. Musk himself has said, “Take away the subsidies, it will only help Tesla,” a clear admission that he would use state power to cripple his competitors.

Beyond corruption, there is the brute desire to dominate others. Musk, now himself an immensely powerful unelected bureaucrat, wants to appear as a master of the universe, lording over others. An example of this vulgar tendency, from a 2023 tweet: “There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish to add to it, but will if given no choice.” His livetweeting of his DOGE administrative coup is littered with contemptuous exchanges with elected officials.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/elon-musk- ... dium=email

[Tero]

https://bsky.app/profile/esa88jarvi.bsk ... tlrqjxsk25

[Tero]

Musk Set to Get Access to Top-Secret U.S. Plan for Potential War With China
Providing Elon Musk with access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a major expansion of his role as an adviser to President Trump. It would also highlight his conflicts of interest.

[Sean Hayden]

—meh, surely anyone who’d need to know wouldn’t need the plans, and everybody else couldn’t read’em even if they had them.

Still, these are crazy times, and fuck that guy.

[pErvinalia]

fuck that guy.

FIFY.