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.