I’m more amused than anything. I have some sympathy for Musk because he’s 100% right on the bill on the merits so breaking people on principle is always a plus in my book.
That being said: Musk fucked up. Supporting Trump was a stupid idea and he got nothing out of this; Trump used Musk and then dumped him. Shocking I know (narrator: it was not shocking), but this was a hilariously short marriage of convenience.
I have zero sympathy for Musk. His aim was never efficiency. It was to kill any accountability to which he would be subject. He targeted any agency that would have oversight over his businesses to cripple them, and then helped himself to our personal, financial and health data.
His fake aping of fiscal responsibility is an act that I am tired of hearing lap dogs cheer.
This is mostly true. However, Elon is many things but he's not stupid. I think he knew it would end this way. His support of Trump was a revenge tour against the slights from the state of CA and the the Biden admin. I think he felt that Trump was the only politician transactional enough to allow him to buy access and start a process of reducing the federal bureaucracy. Elon is not motivated by money at all. His ego, which is unfathomably massive, is fed by hacking problems and that's mostly what motivates him.
Not motivated by money at all…. Hilarious comment.
That is quite clearly the ONLY thing he actually does care about. His ‘businesses’ are all 100% long term grift plays, extracting market value off reselling carbon credits, Mars settlements, bitcoin, and other alleged investments in our collective future.
Who is John Galt? He’s a Joker and a Thief.
Grift knows grift which is why they had such a beautiful weekend together at Couples Resort. It was never meant to last.
Don't think that's quite fair - he obviously threw himself into Tesla with or without government subsidies. Much of Tesla's history has been under Democratic presidents eager to bribe people into switching to EVs, of which Musk's products were just the most obvious choice for a long period.
I'm not a fan of Elon, but I have worked with him a bit, and this is just my observation. What I mean is that he is not motivated by money in the way that most people are motivated by money. He is interested in money primarily for its utility to solve problems. I don't think he solves problems altruistically in the purest sense, I think he solves problems to feed his ego, which is insatiable. In his defense, I don't think he is self aware about this. I think he truly believes he is trying to save mankind from itself.
I get that both-sidesism has become a big part of your brand, but the repeated suggestion that the parties are equally hypocritical about deficit reduction is downright disingenuous. We've now lived through multiple cycles of GOP leadership tanking the economy while exacerbating deficits with tax cuts and increased military spending. The succeeding Democratic administrations have had to embrace aggressive stimulus to stave off recessions, and then have endeavored to moderate spending while raising taxes on higher earners and businesses. The filibuster has rendered increasing revenues nigh impossible, so it becomes a one-way door. Democratic spending priorities are also more inherently stimulating, given the programs and beneficiaries they target, and thus exacerbate deficits less than GOP actions.
You don't think Biden's administration over-corrected and over-spent dragging the U.S. out of COVID lockdowns? I thought that had been well established.
Do agree that it's not a 50/50 contribution. Obama had deficits coming down, and Clinton ran surpluses.
Biden couldn't roll back the Trump tax cuts. Not during the Covid recovery, and not after the D's lost the House.
If you look at the graph of deficit as a % GDP, the trend before and after Covid is pretty clear.
Biden may have spent more than necessary, but how much more is up for debate. The US certainly recovered better and faster than places that went on austerity diets.
My sources say that every president has been crap on the budget deficit since Clinton.
They also say that Obama improved things from disastrous to merely terrible, then got worse again.
It’s astonishing how much I look back at the Clinton/Gingrich era now as an era of good government when at the time I disliked both of them and would have happily seen them both replaced. At least they could come together and solve problems despite their differences.
At the end of the day, who cares if it is a 50/50 problem? Both parties have been terrible on the deficit. Debating who is worse is pointless in my mind when both parties have been so obviously bad.
Sorry, but no. One party cuts taxes and tries to defund services for the poor and middle class. The other is not nearly as bad. You're as guilty as Nate for the transparent both-sidesing of the difference between the economic policies of the parties.
The suggestion that Silver is writing from the point of view of a brand is unfair. It implies insincerity. His voice has been consistent going back to Prospectus. If he were building a “brand,” I think his voice would have changed more. The fact that there is a market for nuanced writing does not mean the writer crafted a voice for that market.
There’s nothing really insightful in here. It’s a litany of obvious stuff that is probably 80% kinder than it should be to both of the egotistical, sociopathic man-babies.
Nate even ignores the history of fascist governments where the powerful initial supporters are the first against the wall.
An idiot focused party very much did win last year and now we are suffering the consequences. My wish is for the idiot constituency to be split and allow the center (Democrats) to regain power
The odds of Elon successfully forming a third party seem absurd to me, so tiny they should be rounded down to zero. What's his constituency? His approval was already down to -14% with 80+% of Republicans supporting him; what's that going to look like after today's tirade, especially if Trump really starts hammering him?
I'm not really sure what his platform would be other than Not-R/D and some techno utopianism. He sure as heck can't claim to be a savvy manager of the government. There are some pockets of people who deeply admire his work and love the futurism stuff, but even within tech and other nerdy communities his haters greatly out number his supporters at this point. To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter. His recent history of gleefully wrecking the lives of a few million people isn't going to endear him to the masses.
I do agree with Nate that it would be interesting to see the natural experiment of just how far he could get with money and twitter, but I think even Elon will realize what a ridiculous idea his own party would be when he wakes up sober tomorrow.
The only surprise for me is that it took this long to happen. Both protagonists are used to being the capo di tutti capi. Trump's patience with Musk more than likely had more to do with Musk's wealth than anything else.
DOGE was an abysmal failure, falling way short of a trillion with something close to 1% of that figure. I can't imagine why. Who wouldn't want someone with the sobriquet "Big Balls" poring over their Social Security records, or stumbling into a high security network that deals with US nuclear defense?
Ultimately, Musk met the same fate as others who tied themselves to the Trump wagon. Just ask Rudy Guiliani how well that worked out for him.
Besides, the notion of a "friendship" between a narcissistic sociopath and anything made up of atoms is absurd on the face of it.
And now we get to enjoy a shit throwing chimp fight between Musk and Trump in real time. Where's the popcorn?
Musk isn't wrong about the BBB being an "abomination". It's that and more. Besides its ideologically driven economic stupidity its got some gems buried in it, like the one that is intended to strangle the authority of that pesky Judiciary to interfere with Trump's edicts and almost any governmental action.
But Musk's reasons for hating it are only partially aligned with mine. We agree that deficit spending needs to stop, and Moody's agrees with us. But I want taxes increased for the richest Americans, who may want a cut but don't need it, nor deserve it, and I want tax loopholes, like carried interest and "invest, borrow, and die" closed, AND I want the Tax Gap addressed, unpaid taxes that amount to close to half a trillion dollars a year, year after year. Musk wants all entitlements cut, Medicaid, Medicare, and that Ponzi scheme, Social Security.
Republicans want cushy jobs on corporate boards after they retire or get kicked out, so they want to protect the interests of their keepers, like the good little lackeys that they are. I'm not saying that Democrats aren't up for that as well, but they have a limit, at least, so far. They aren't going to kick Grandma out into the snow to get run over by a Lamborghini. And if that were to happen they would at least send a sympathy card to General Delivery.
What I am sure of is that the GOP will do the wrong thing in order to procure that cushy life and now they are looking at Medicare in the Senate. Anything but allow their keepers to have to pony up for all that money they make off of other people's labor.
And, if Trump really wants to screw over Musk, he'll allow BYD access to the US Market. Bye Elon!
The Bayesian perspective on the prospects of a new party should be strongly modified by the unprecedented success that new parties are having across much of the rest of the Western world. In France the top three parties, including the incumbent government, are all new. In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls. In countries like Italy and the Netherlands a new party is in power. Even in Germany a new party is second in the polls. Trump himself is evidence of the new party effect in America. So we are clearly in a transitional era of some kind.
Where the analogy breaks down is that the new parties that have been successful have mostly, with the partial exception of France, been right-populist; again, Trump is himself an example of this. Meanwhile, Musk is proposing an elite centrist party that is out of touch with the prevailing counter-elite sentiment. Like Bloomberg et al before him, there just isn't much of a popular constituency for elite centrism, least of all now.
The notion of “centrists” being attracted to Musk is grotesque given his support of racist terrorism in the UK and the nazi-adjacent AfD party in Germany, his delight in ruining the careers and lives of ordinary workers etc etc etc. A drug addled fantasy.
Yes, it's a nonsense. The centre-left will never forgive his apostasy. Musk is surrounded by too many Yes Men, including his Xitter groupies, to understand this, though.
The Labour government has had a disastrous year, and the Conservatives are still hated after their disastrous several years. So the current poll leader is a new populist-right party, Reform UK, led by the man who masterminded Brexit, Nigel Farage. They absolutely crushed the local elections a month ago, proving they can translate polling into votes.
I believe your analogy breaks down with the American “First Past The Post” electoral system and the Presidential Election’s Electoral College. The examples you cite are mostly Parliaments. France is not, but the Presidential vote is by direct popular vote. So in effect, a third party winning a congressional seat becomes either irrelevant in legislative action or caucuses with a party. The caucusing effectively becomes a de facto part of the party they caucus with. The third party would have to win a majority of an entire state to win any presidential electoral votes. Having just a single state’s electoral votes is still miles away from likely having any real influence.
We have third parties, already. They sometimes back some seemingly popular positions. They are still largely ineffectual, at least in terms of gaining enough support to win elections.
It seems to me that the idea of third political parties in the US is mostly just wishful thinking from partisans hoping to attract significant members of the other political party without having to compromise any of their own political positions.
Britain is FPTP too. Don't be so certain of American exceptionalism. The real reason the analogy doesn't work is as I stated, that this is a right-populist moment and Trump is already satisfying that demand.
Minor point, but Britain may be FPTP, but it is also a Parliament. A third party can gain a few seats in Parliament and wield that to influence who forms the government. That is not the case in the US.
So whether Trump is right/populist or another figure emerges on either the right or the left is immaterial in this specific contention. A third party has to very quickly win massive vote support to have any meaningful impact on national politics in the US based on both FPTP and the Electoral College
Yes, but a US third party could do the same at the Congressional level though. The US is not a Presidential dictatorship, no matter how much the media's coverage might make it appear to be. Congress is still important and is a vector for a third party to make gains.
For example, if Trump had not been successful in hijacking the Republican Party, it would not have been at all implausible for a dissident populist right party to emerge. This would be the British model of Faragist parties (UKIP-Brexit-Reform) snowballing as the establishment conservative party resists takeover attempts only to be eventually superseded and supplanted.
Watching Trump and Musk fight is like going to the movies to see Godzilla v. King Kong — to dreadfully hideous monsters battling for no apparent reason than that they are both sociopaths and egomaniacs. Oh, that they destroy each other. As my beloved Aunt would say of two battling siblings, “a pox on both their houses….”
Elon Musk clearly does not understand Trump's flavor of Corruption. Why didn't he just stuff a little more into the unmarked envelope for Trump? Musk could of just bought some Trump Family meme coins. What is a little more surprising is his lack of faith in the power of money to stir the general Stew of Corruption that is Congress. As it is, the Chinese will probably be enjoying a fire-sale soon enough of the Musk Empire EV assets foolishly built within their domain. But no, Mr. Impulsive is scaring the feces out of his backers and shareholders with the now verbalized threat from Trump that he could, with a few strokes of a Sharpie, could crush Elon's Empire, or at least tangle it up in knots so badly it would take years to unravel. Elon better not mention anything about certain popular Mexican dishes. Would three and half years be long enough to send Musk into bankruptcy? Probably. If it gave the Dems an opportunity to rectify the stupid mistake of allowing NASA and the Military to become overly dependent on one erratic man, would the Dems save Musk? Probably not. I have zero doubts Trump and his gangsters would figure ways to profit from Musk's corporate-butchering. Not that cutting the cord to an excessive dependence on a single drug addled unstable pseudo-genius (from today's vantage point) business-personality wouldn't be best for the country in the short, medium, and long run. We shouldn't forget that the Democrats where right there with the Republicans when the United States put so many of their eggs in a "crazy" (according to a recent Trump tweet) man's basket. A "crazy" man utterly beholding to China at the time and still so today. Space-X is unique, but, the engineers could go to new companies and quickly pick up where they left off after the Musk Empire's unplanned disassembly and the Trumpian feeding frenzy on the parts.
The thing that kills third parties is the lack of attention(oxygen) from the press. Musk has not only $$$$ for Advertising but a large social media presence he controls. If able to recruit several good communicators from both sides it could take off.
Third parties are a fever dream of those who think that another party will somehow better represent the moderate voter and thereby the interest of a "real America". The problem is that "moderate voters" want different things. In particular, the so called moderate voter may be a social liberal and an economic conservative. Others may be a social conservative and an economic liberal. And many may be less driven by issues and more motivated by style or personality. In addition, many moderate voters say they want change, but when changes are made the frequently say, "no not that". Witness the phenomena of voting for a party in the general election and then tossing them out in the next congressional election. So I am not at all sure that a third party will be any more successful in representing the middle of American politics. Having said that one of the problems of the Democratic Party is that it is attempting to represent a very broad spectrum of interests.
David Hogg, Ro Kahanna, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefink, JD. Vance ,AOC types. Whether your left or right these individuals are great speakers. Great communicators to make this Swamp vs non Swamp, Oligarchy vs Non Oligarchy, Freedom vs loss of freedom etc...
To points 16 and 17, I think we can all look at Ross Perot to see the likelihood of one man starting a new political force. And that's the problem - if a single person is the sole face of a political movement, then it dies once that person exits the political arena.
I’m more amused than anything. I have some sympathy for Musk because he’s 100% right on the bill on the merits so breaking people on principle is always a plus in my book.
That being said: Musk fucked up. Supporting Trump was a stupid idea and he got nothing out of this; Trump used Musk and then dumped him. Shocking I know (narrator: it was not shocking), but this was a hilariously short marriage of convenience.
I have zero sympathy for Musk. His aim was never efficiency. It was to kill any accountability to which he would be subject. He targeted any agency that would have oversight over his businesses to cripple them, and then helped himself to our personal, financial and health data.
His fake aping of fiscal responsibility is an act that I am tired of hearing lap dogs cheer.
This is mostly true. However, Elon is many things but he's not stupid. I think he knew it would end this way. His support of Trump was a revenge tour against the slights from the state of CA and the the Biden admin. I think he felt that Trump was the only politician transactional enough to allow him to buy access and start a process of reducing the federal bureaucracy. Elon is not motivated by money at all. His ego, which is unfathomably massive, is fed by hacking problems and that's mostly what motivates him.
He can be smart in some things and dumb in others
Not motivated by money at all…. Hilarious comment.
That is quite clearly the ONLY thing he actually does care about. His ‘businesses’ are all 100% long term grift plays, extracting market value off reselling carbon credits, Mars settlements, bitcoin, and other alleged investments in our collective future.
Who is John Galt? He’s a Joker and a Thief.
Grift knows grift which is why they had such a beautiful weekend together at Couples Resort. It was never meant to last.
Don't think that's quite fair - he obviously threw himself into Tesla with or without government subsidies. Much of Tesla's history has been under Democratic presidents eager to bribe people into switching to EVs, of which Musk's products were just the most obvious choice for a long period.
And then abandoned the charging network and keeping the models current. He also allowed his dumb ego to put the Cybertruck into production.
Oh don't get me wrong. I bought a Hyundai Ioniq instead.
Leasing an EV9. So much nicer than any Tesla. And real controls.
I'm not a fan of Elon, but I have worked with him a bit, and this is just my observation. What I mean is that he is not motivated by money in the way that most people are motivated by money. He is interested in money primarily for its utility to solve problems. I don't think he solves problems altruistically in the purest sense, I think he solves problems to feed his ego, which is insatiable. In his defense, I don't think he is self aware about this. I think he truly believes he is trying to save mankind from itself.
I know John Galt, and Elon, you're no John Galt.
The Bulwark is garbage, but broken clocks and all that. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/elon-musk-thinks-he-is-an-ayn-rand-hero-nope-one-of-her-villains-silicon-valley-thiel-andreessen
And his revenge tour against the Democratic Party would be exhibit A of petty slights
I get that both-sidesism has become a big part of your brand, but the repeated suggestion that the parties are equally hypocritical about deficit reduction is downright disingenuous. We've now lived through multiple cycles of GOP leadership tanking the economy while exacerbating deficits with tax cuts and increased military spending. The succeeding Democratic administrations have had to embrace aggressive stimulus to stave off recessions, and then have endeavored to moderate spending while raising taxes on higher earners and businesses. The filibuster has rendered increasing revenues nigh impossible, so it becomes a one-way door. Democratic spending priorities are also more inherently stimulating, given the programs and beneficiaries they target, and thus exacerbate deficits less than GOP actions.
You don't think Biden's administration over-corrected and over-spent dragging the U.S. out of COVID lockdowns? I thought that had been well established.
Do agree that it's not a 50/50 contribution. Obama had deficits coming down, and Clinton ran surpluses.
Biden couldn't roll back the Trump tax cuts. Not during the Covid recovery, and not after the D's lost the House.
If you look at the graph of deficit as a % GDP, the trend before and after Covid is pretty clear.
Biden may have spent more than necessary, but how much more is up for debate. The US certainly recovered better and faster than places that went on austerity diets.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Jtbb
My sources say that every president has been crap on the budget deficit since Clinton.
They also say that Obama improved things from disastrous to merely terrible, then got worse again.
It’s astonishing how much I look back at the Clinton/Gingrich era now as an era of good government when at the time I disliked both of them and would have happily seen them both replaced. At least they could come together and solve problems despite their differences.
At the end of the day, who cares if it is a 50/50 problem? Both parties have been terrible on the deficit. Debating who is worse is pointless in my mind when both parties have been so obviously bad.
Sorry, but no. One party cuts taxes and tries to defund services for the poor and middle class. The other is not nearly as bad. You're as guilty as Nate for the transparent both-sidesing of the difference between the economic policies of the parties.
Motives and methods matter.
The suggestion that Silver is writing from the point of view of a brand is unfair. It implies insincerity. His voice has been consistent going back to Prospectus. If he were building a “brand,” I think his voice would have changed more. The fact that there is a market for nuanced writing does not mean the writer crafted a voice for that market.
I'm surprised Nate made this a free post. These gems of wisdom are worth millions.
There’s nothing really insightful in here. It’s a litany of obvious stuff that is probably 80% kinder than it should be to both of the egotistical, sociopathic man-babies.
Nate even ignores the history of fascist governments where the powerful initial supporters are the first against the wall.
Yes. I thought my comment was sufficiently dripping wet with sarcasm. But perhaps not.
Nope, not in this overconfident techbro adjacent echo chamber.
Fair enough. Respect.
Omg please elon start a party to compete for the idiot vote this solves all our problems
Careful what you wish for. I’m on the left and there are plenty of idiots to go around. An idiot focused party might win.
An idiot focused party very much did win last year and now we are suffering the consequences. My wish is for the idiot constituency to be split and allow the center (Democrats) to regain power
Camacho for President!
"You can’t take either party’s commitment to deficit reduction seriously"
Unless of course you actually look at the data...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1G3FM&height=490
The odds of Elon successfully forming a third party seem absurd to me, so tiny they should be rounded down to zero. What's his constituency? His approval was already down to -14% with 80+% of Republicans supporting him; what's that going to look like after today's tirade, especially if Trump really starts hammering him?
I'm not really sure what his platform would be other than Not-R/D and some techno utopianism. He sure as heck can't claim to be a savvy manager of the government. There are some pockets of people who deeply admire his work and love the futurism stuff, but even within tech and other nerdy communities his haters greatly out number his supporters at this point. To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter. His recent history of gleefully wrecking the lives of a few million people isn't going to endear him to the masses.
I do agree with Nate that it would be interesting to see the natural experiment of just how far he could get with money and twitter, but I think even Elon will realize what a ridiculous idea his own party would be when he wakes up sober tomorrow.
Splitting the asshole vote between MAGA and Musk would basically give a supermajority to Dems.
Kennedy third party run went no where but his endorsement to Trump was impactful.
“To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter.”
Hey, that sounds a lot like Ross Perot!
The only surprise for me is that it took this long to happen. Both protagonists are used to being the capo di tutti capi. Trump's patience with Musk more than likely had more to do with Musk's wealth than anything else.
DOGE was an abysmal failure, falling way short of a trillion with something close to 1% of that figure. I can't imagine why. Who wouldn't want someone with the sobriquet "Big Balls" poring over their Social Security records, or stumbling into a high security network that deals with US nuclear defense?
Ultimately, Musk met the same fate as others who tied themselves to the Trump wagon. Just ask Rudy Guiliani how well that worked out for him.
Besides, the notion of a "friendship" between a narcissistic sociopath and anything made up of atoms is absurd on the face of it.
And now we get to enjoy a shit throwing chimp fight between Musk and Trump in real time. Where's the popcorn?
Musk isn't wrong about the BBB being an "abomination". It's that and more. Besides its ideologically driven economic stupidity its got some gems buried in it, like the one that is intended to strangle the authority of that pesky Judiciary to interfere with Trump's edicts and almost any governmental action.
But Musk's reasons for hating it are only partially aligned with mine. We agree that deficit spending needs to stop, and Moody's agrees with us. But I want taxes increased for the richest Americans, who may want a cut but don't need it, nor deserve it, and I want tax loopholes, like carried interest and "invest, borrow, and die" closed, AND I want the Tax Gap addressed, unpaid taxes that amount to close to half a trillion dollars a year, year after year. Musk wants all entitlements cut, Medicaid, Medicare, and that Ponzi scheme, Social Security.
Republicans want cushy jobs on corporate boards after they retire or get kicked out, so they want to protect the interests of their keepers, like the good little lackeys that they are. I'm not saying that Democrats aren't up for that as well, but they have a limit, at least, so far. They aren't going to kick Grandma out into the snow to get run over by a Lamborghini. And if that were to happen they would at least send a sympathy card to General Delivery.
What I am sure of is that the GOP will do the wrong thing in order to procure that cushy life and now they are looking at Medicare in the Senate. Anything but allow their keepers to have to pony up for all that money they make off of other people's labor.
And, if Trump really wants to screw over Musk, he'll allow BYD access to the US Market. Bye Elon!
The Bayesian perspective on the prospects of a new party should be strongly modified by the unprecedented success that new parties are having across much of the rest of the Western world. In France the top three parties, including the incumbent government, are all new. In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls. In countries like Italy and the Netherlands a new party is in power. Even in Germany a new party is second in the polls. Trump himself is evidence of the new party effect in America. So we are clearly in a transitional era of some kind.
Where the analogy breaks down is that the new parties that have been successful have mostly, with the partial exception of France, been right-populist; again, Trump is himself an example of this. Meanwhile, Musk is proposing an elite centrist party that is out of touch with the prevailing counter-elite sentiment. Like Bloomberg et al before him, there just isn't much of a popular constituency for elite centrism, least of all now.
The notion of “centrists” being attracted to Musk is grotesque given his support of racist terrorism in the UK and the nazi-adjacent AfD party in Germany, his delight in ruining the careers and lives of ordinary workers etc etc etc. A drug addled fantasy.
Yes, it's a nonsense. The centre-left will never forgive his apostasy. Musk is surrounded by too many Yes Men, including his Xitter groupies, to understand this, though.
> In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls.
Wait, what? When did this happen?
The Labour government has had a disastrous year, and the Conservatives are still hated after their disastrous several years. So the current poll leader is a new populist-right party, Reform UK, led by the man who masterminded Brexit, Nigel Farage. They absolutely crushed the local elections a month ago, proving they can translate polling into votes.
I believe your analogy breaks down with the American “First Past The Post” electoral system and the Presidential Election’s Electoral College. The examples you cite are mostly Parliaments. France is not, but the Presidential vote is by direct popular vote. So in effect, a third party winning a congressional seat becomes either irrelevant in legislative action or caucuses with a party. The caucusing effectively becomes a de facto part of the party they caucus with. The third party would have to win a majority of an entire state to win any presidential electoral votes. Having just a single state’s electoral votes is still miles away from likely having any real influence.
We have third parties, already. They sometimes back some seemingly popular positions. They are still largely ineffectual, at least in terms of gaining enough support to win elections.
It seems to me that the idea of third political parties in the US is mostly just wishful thinking from partisans hoping to attract significant members of the other political party without having to compromise any of their own political positions.
Britain is FPTP too. Don't be so certain of American exceptionalism. The real reason the analogy doesn't work is as I stated, that this is a right-populist moment and Trump is already satisfying that demand.
Minor point, but Britain may be FPTP, but it is also a Parliament. A third party can gain a few seats in Parliament and wield that to influence who forms the government. That is not the case in the US.
So whether Trump is right/populist or another figure emerges on either the right or the left is immaterial in this specific contention. A third party has to very quickly win massive vote support to have any meaningful impact on national politics in the US based on both FPTP and the Electoral College
Yes, but a US third party could do the same at the Congressional level though. The US is not a Presidential dictatorship, no matter how much the media's coverage might make it appear to be. Congress is still important and is a vector for a third party to make gains.
For example, if Trump had not been successful in hijacking the Republican Party, it would not have been at all implausible for a dissident populist right party to emerge. This would be the British model of Faragist parties (UKIP-Brexit-Reform) snowballing as the establishment conservative party resists takeover attempts only to be eventually superseded and supplanted.
Watching Trump and Musk fight is like going to the movies to see Godzilla v. King Kong — to dreadfully hideous monsters battling for no apparent reason than that they are both sociopaths and egomaniacs. Oh, that they destroy each other. As my beloved Aunt would say of two battling siblings, “a pox on both their houses….”
It's a DOGE eat DOGE world and TSLA stockholders are wearing Musk scented underwear.
(Apologies to Cheers writers)
Elon Musk clearly does not understand Trump's flavor of Corruption. Why didn't he just stuff a little more into the unmarked envelope for Trump? Musk could of just bought some Trump Family meme coins. What is a little more surprising is his lack of faith in the power of money to stir the general Stew of Corruption that is Congress. As it is, the Chinese will probably be enjoying a fire-sale soon enough of the Musk Empire EV assets foolishly built within their domain. But no, Mr. Impulsive is scaring the feces out of his backers and shareholders with the now verbalized threat from Trump that he could, with a few strokes of a Sharpie, could crush Elon's Empire, or at least tangle it up in knots so badly it would take years to unravel. Elon better not mention anything about certain popular Mexican dishes. Would three and half years be long enough to send Musk into bankruptcy? Probably. If it gave the Dems an opportunity to rectify the stupid mistake of allowing NASA and the Military to become overly dependent on one erratic man, would the Dems save Musk? Probably not. I have zero doubts Trump and his gangsters would figure ways to profit from Musk's corporate-butchering. Not that cutting the cord to an excessive dependence on a single drug addled unstable pseudo-genius (from today's vantage point) business-personality wouldn't be best for the country in the short, medium, and long run. We shouldn't forget that the Democrats where right there with the Republicans when the United States put so many of their eggs in a "crazy" (according to a recent Trump tweet) man's basket. A "crazy" man utterly beholding to China at the time and still so today. Space-X is unique, but, the engineers could go to new companies and quickly pick up where they left off after the Musk Empire's unplanned disassembly and the Trumpian feeding frenzy on the parts.
The thing that kills third parties is the lack of attention(oxygen) from the press. Musk has not only $$$$ for Advertising but a large social media presence he controls. If able to recruit several good communicators from both sides it could take off.
Third parties are a fever dream of those who think that another party will somehow better represent the moderate voter and thereby the interest of a "real America". The problem is that "moderate voters" want different things. In particular, the so called moderate voter may be a social liberal and an economic conservative. Others may be a social conservative and an economic liberal. And many may be less driven by issues and more motivated by style or personality. In addition, many moderate voters say they want change, but when changes are made the frequently say, "no not that". Witness the phenomena of voting for a party in the general election and then tossing them out in the next congressional election. So I am not at all sure that a third party will be any more successful in representing the middle of American politics. Having said that one of the problems of the Democratic Party is that it is attempting to represent a very broad spectrum of interests.
Musk needs best of breed communicators like
David Hogg, Ro Kahanna, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefink, JD. Vance ,AOC types. Whether your left or right these individuals are great speakers. Great communicators to make this Swamp vs non Swamp, Oligarchy vs Non Oligarchy, Freedom vs loss of freedom etc...
To points 16 and 17, I think we can all look at Ross Perot to see the likelihood of one man starting a new political force. And that's the problem - if a single person is the sole face of a political movement, then it dies once that person exits the political arena.
Nah, Ross Perot killed his own party because his ego wouldn't let Ventura take the reigns.
https://youtu.be/NqqaW1LrMTY?si=x6Hi1epmwV1OSZA-
Is there merit to the idea that when Musk says Trump doesn't win the election without him he's referring to something beyond the money he donated?
Exactly
So what's up with the Luka trade? Did we ever find out what was wrong with him or why they made that trade?
And the Democrats sing we are still here and still disorganized so don’t mind us.