Some Thoughts On Elon vs Trump

Here are a few thoughts about the Big Story:

This whole epic falling out was nothing if not predictable. There's just no way those two egomaniacs could work together for the next four years and both seem to have wanted different things out of the relationship. Trump seems to have viewed Elon as a bit of a stalking horse tasked with doing unpopular things, largely getting revenge on all the groups/people/institutions Trump hates. While Elon seems to have fallen into the old Franz von Papen trap where you think Trump is a someone you can control while you get to be the power behind the throne. 

But as other's who tried this with Trump have found out it doesn't work and in the end Trump discards those aspiring Grey Eminences Thomas Cromwell style (too many metaphors I know) when it suits him.  

This seems like a heck of a lot bigger than a president replacing a chief of staff (which is always a big deal but still pretty common historically speaking) for a number of reasons.

Elon had a far greater role in running than any other white house chief of staff in history (there's a reason I referenced Wolf Hall above!) and Elon remains a giant larger than life person (the world's richest man! Who owns a website super popular with media people! etc etc) who will likely remain a major force in politics and business for the foreseeable future. 

Just compare Elon's position to that of Don Regan* who was Reagan's chief of staff in 1985 and 1986. There's a big epic story here but the TLDR version is Regan was terrible at the job and sailed the ship into the iceberg with Iran-Contra and alienating Congress. Regan also made many enemies inside Dutch's inner circle and eventually Reagan's people were finally able to talk him into dumping ole Don and by all accounts wasn't a very amicable divorce.

So Don, took his brutal revenge. He wrote a book making fun of Reagan as being old and out of touch with what was going on (YMMV on if this was true) and made a lot of funny claims about Nancy involving astrologists (YMMV on that as well).

Then Regan went back to his big house in Virginia and spent the rest of his life painting landscape painting.

Elon probably won't be going away like that. And back then the whole Regan/Reagan thing was seen as a big deal that everyone in DC talked about for six months or so.

*Reagan's chief of staff was named Regan? What can I say, the 80's were a confusing time.

American Political Ideology Explained (New York City Grocery Store Edition)

So I saw people fighting about this on Twitter (sorry I refuse to call it X) and I thought it was, in it’s own strange way, a good way to illustrate differences between ideologies in contemporary American politics.

My main objection to this plan isn’t that it’s “communism” (it isn’t, just look at any number of municipal booze stores in Minnesota) but rather it wouldn’t work as any such store actually owned and run by the City of New York would inevitably be bogged down by an absurd number of rules and requirements ($28 an hour starting wage, union transported and locally sourced food, how do we know these casavas were ethically sources? etc.) so it's easy to see these stores operating in the red (while probably not have a great array of products or service). 

There are of course grocery stores like this in America, and they tend to get shut down (such is the logic of a market economy) but I guess they could be run indefinitely if the city decided to keep hemorrhaging money to keep them running?

Anyway I do think the question of “how should the next Mayor of New York City address the issue of food insecurity in our communities?” is helpful to differentiate ideologies. Here’s roughly how I see most important political ideologies in America these days answering:

• Left Ideology (think Zohran Mamdani himself): Capitalism simply can’t work, read Marx, it will inevitably fail. So the solution is to build a system of grocery stores run by the City of New York that will operate at a loss to provide food to those who need it.
• Current Liberal Ideology (think Joe Biden or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey): The city should give grants to NGOs and community based organizations to distribute food, this should be monitored through a rigorous process of grant reporting and such.
• New Liberal/Neoliberal ideology (think this book): Just give people who need food a debit card to buy it, we could call it SNAP
• Old Conservative ideology (Think Scott Walker): They can get a SNAP card but it needs to be worth less and we need strict rules on what can be bought…no sharp cheddar!
• MAGA ideology (Think Elon): The “food insecure” will be sent to one of our new Kennedy Wellness Centers, where a program of rigorous vegetable/fruit harvesting and group therapy sessions will make them whole and cure them of the woke mind virus. (Note failure to report to your Wellness Center may result in deportation to El Salvador or being turned into biodiesel)

This doesn't cover everything in American political ideology of course, but in terms of "how should the welfare state be structured" I think it does help illuminate stuff.