Elon Musk-Donald Trump Teamup Should Go Great For At Least Several Minutes, Possibly 10
Worst Marvel 'What If' comic ever.
According to a scoop by the Wall Street Journal (gift link), Donald Trump and Elon Musk have kicked around the idea of Musk having a “possible advisory role” in the White House, should Trump win this fall’s election. The story notes that any potential role for Musk “hasn’t been fully hammered out and might not happen,” according to insider sources, but the two wealthy sociopathic narcissists — one of whom really is wealthy — have been chatting on the phone and sharing ideas about border security and preventing “voter fraud.”
We suspect the two Great Men have incredibly stupid, simplistic ideas about both, which if enacted would probably be unconstitutional, violate human rights, or both. Not that such trivialities would deter either guy.
The Journal says that Musk and another actual billionaire, Nelson Peltz, “briefed Trump on a plan they have developed to invest in a data-driven project to prevent voter fraud,” according to those insiders. The pair have also let Trump know they’ve been hosting rich and powerful people to tell them to forget Joe Biden, because Trump is just the kindest bravest warmest most wonderful human being they’ve ever met.
The story notes that whatever differences may have separated them have been smoothed over now, although Musk formerly criticized Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017. But now, they just can’t stop calling each other, or at least they talk on the phone several times a month:
The pair have held discussions on immigration, technology and science, including the U.S. Space Force. Their views and interests have grown more aligned, the people said, with Musk calling Trump directly on his cellphone.
Trump has told Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people, he wants to find a way to get him more involved if he wins in November.
Considering that the two assholes together are a constant stream of misinformation and conspiracy nonsense, it makes perfect sense they’d see eye-to-eye, at least before they ever actually try to work together, which tends to be a problem with people Trump gloms onto.
We learn that Trump, Musk, and Peltz were among many “wealthy and powerful friends,” who gathered at Peltz’s “sprawling oceanfront estate in Palm Beach” to discuss Musk’s possible advisory job, the voter-fraud detection project, and for all we know how all three will conquer the world just as soon as Musk’s secrete submarine base under a volcano is completed.
In what has to be the greatest paragraph published in the Wall Street Journal since its 2011 editorial decrying “Lucky Duckies” who are too poor to pay income tax, we learn that
Musk and his young son X, who often joins him at events, were part of a group that also included Trump and his 18-year-old son, Barron. Musk and Peltz know each other in part through Peltz’s son Diesel, a tech entrepreneur who is friendly with Musk. Diesel Peltz was at the breakfast as well.
Somewhere, Moon Unit, Diva Muffin, Dweezil, and Ahmet Emuukha Rodan Zappa just silently thanked their parents for giving them more dignified names.
If Musk were to get a job working for — err, independently advising — Trump, one of the insiders told the Journal, the position would be something like the role handed to Trump confidant and Mar-a-Lago club member Isaac Perlmutter, who along with two other Mar-a-Laganns was deposited in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the trio made a nuisance of themselves and made up policy off the tops of their heads despite never having worked in government before.
Except Musk would no doubt be even better, because unlike Perlmutter, he would come with his very own huge Twitter following and would no doubt chafe at being limited to just one Cabinet agency.
As for the great idea Musk and Peltz have for elections, it sure sounds like some impressive vaporware, as far as the Journal report goes. They have “told acquaintances they are working on a data-driven project to ensure votes are fairly counted,” and apparently Trump is pretty enthusiastic about this new weapon against voter fraud, which is extremely rare in the first place. That’s honestly the deepest level of detail the Journal could come up with, but that phrase “data-driven” was enough all by itself to set off warning lights for the Washington Post’s political data nerd Philip Bump (gift link), who points out that attempts to use algorithms to detect “voter fraud” are a mug’s game, albeit one that’s very popular with rightwing mugs who think cherry-picking is a legitimate method of statistical analysis.
One of the many problems with just crunching a bunch of voting data and declaring something has to be hinky, Bump says, is that these would-be Sherlocks tend to flatly dismiss the many checks that states already have in place to prevent multiple votes from one person (and to detect it when it does occur, a handful of times every election).
The thing that believers in massive in-person voter fraud always miss, Bump notes, is that it’s incredibly difficult to convince enough real people to commit a felony for the sake of giving a candidate one extra vote each. Sure, there are sometimes larger fraud schemes, but once you start mucking with lots of ballots — hi, corrupt Republican scheme in North Carolina a few years back! — it’s also very likely to be spotted.
None of that matters to Trump or Musk, of course, since they start with the assumption that in-person voting fraud is rampant, then work backwards to create “evidence.”
Sadly, the Wall Street Journal piece didn’t offer any details of the Two Stable Geniuses’ plans for fixing immigration. We bet it involves moats and lasers, at the very least.
[WSJ (gift link) / WaPo (gift link)]
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The stock photo up top is especially apropos, since I'm reading John Scalzi's novel "Starter Villain," about, well, villains and their cats, who are much more than housepets and that's all the spoiler you get.
OT: Reference questionnaires have gone out to my former supervisors and the ICU manager at the hospital where I worked in Austin, the president of my synagogue in Austin, and the rabbi I worked with in Florida. Now we wait.