Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: the bromance between Trump and Elon Musk cannot last–David Nasaw will explain why. But first: hope in the dark. Rebecca Solnit will explain–in a minute.
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What does it mean to hold onto hope right now? For that, we turn to Rebecca Solnit. She wrote the book Hope in the Dark a while ago, in another dark time. It seems more necessary now than ever. Rebecca is a columnist for The Guardian. Last time we talked with her here was about the book she co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Before that we talked about her award-winning book Orwell’s Roses. We reached her today at home in San Francisco. Rebecca, welcome back.
Rebecca Solnit: Thank you, Jon. Here we are.
JW: I need to ask you about what hope means right now. People say, ‘how can you have hope when we just suffered such a disastrous defeat, and when we know things are going to get really bad?’
RS: Václav Havel said, “Hope is not about outcomes, it’s an orientation of the spirit.” Mariame Kaba said, “Hope is a discipline.”
JW: And you say “hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying that we will not give up. That we will assess our powers and weaknesses and recognize that the future we face looks grim, but we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose. How it will unfold depends in no small part on what we do.” And we also know we’ve been surprised many times in the past by huge changes we never imagined.
But you also say you don’t want to talk about hope right now.
RS: I did decide to kind of park hope for the week and talk instead about being resolute.
Something I’ve known for a very long time, whether I’m dealing with the fossil fuel industry or patriarchy or whatever, is, your enemies would like you to surrender, to say, ‘oh, they’ve won. I’m powerless. There’s nothing I can do,’ Don’t give them the satisfaction, for starters. And second of all, yes the outcome of the presidential election was terrible. At the same time, a bunch of really cool progressives got elected, climate champions, young women of color, and a bunch of abortion referendums passed.
For me, the deepest truth revealed by this election when it comes to Harris versus Trump is that, thanks particularly to Silicon Valley, the public is profoundly uninformed, misinformed, and it’s not a verb, but I think ‘disinformed’ should be something, the kind of willful propaganda distortion. And people did not necessarily like him or his policies, but they lived inside a lot of bubbles of wildly inaccurate, distorted misinformation and priorities that would make you think, for example, trans girls playing softball is more important than climate change, which could wreck the entire South Asian subcontinent, in large part is already killing in excess of 10 million people a year, et cetera, and, unlike trans girls playing softball, who are not killing anyone.
JW: I want to talk about each of these things a little. Your recent piece for The Guardian quotes Timothy Snyder — after Trump won the 2016 election, he told us, “Do not obey prematurely. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” Perhaps you could comment on that.
RS: Yeah, you can already see with the newspaper billionaires withdrawing their endorsements at The LA Times and The Washington Post, or rather withdrawing their editors’ endorsements of Harris, obeying in advance. And you can see a lot of people who are powerful enough not have to, kind of groveling to Trump and MAGA right now. But what I always like to add to “do not obey prematurely” is do not obey maturely, either.
JW: Exactly.
RS: I get that if there’s a gun at your head, maybe you don’t want to get shot and you’re going to have to obey. But for a lot of us, I speak here as a US-born, straight, white Californian. I know my stakes are radically different than the stakes of an immigrant, a brown person, a Black person, a queer person, which is all the more reason why people like me should stand up and take risks.
So to me, “do not obey prematurely” means anticipating danger, and obeying “maturely” is half a joke. But seriously, it does mean even when there actually are threats. Look at the heroes who did not obey. Look at the extraordinary resistance of the most oppressed people in this country. Enslaved Black people before 1865, indigenous people who over the course of centuries did not give up, and resisted in beautiful and creative ways, often at great risk to themselves. And we’ve got plenty of heroes to look to as well, to remind us of that; somebody said recently, “Sometimes a hero makes history. Often history makes heroes.”
JW: You say our first job is not being like “them” – like the MAGA people
RS: A lot of times when something happens, we feel frightened, we feel sad, we feel grief. Those are emotions that make you feel more vulnerable. A lot of people transmute them into anger because anger doesn’t make the same demands on you. It makes you feel powerful. You stop looking at what happened. You stop looking at yourself, you start pointing the finger at someone else. You get your exciting little cortisol and adrenaline surges, and it makes people feel invulnerable, but it’s often not very helpful for you or anything else.
Something a lot of activists on the left and in progressive movements tend to believe is that anger is this magic motivating superpower. I think often they’re looking at, ‘oh, I’m looking at how I feel when I see the forest or the children of Gaza’ pick your subcategory ‘are under attack,’ but what you’re really feeling is protectiveness.
And what’s underneath that is love. And I quoted GK Chesterton saying something to the effect that what motivates the good soldier, leaving aside militarism here, is not the enemy he faces, but what he loves that’s behind him. And I think that what motivates great activists, great champions, heroes, is really love. It’s because you love the forest, you love the children, you love justice, you love human rights, you love the earth, that you do these things — and they’re not attacking you and you’re not fighting them. So it’s easy to lose sight of the thing themself and to lose sight of what I think is the deepest motive, which is love.
And I think staying in touch with that love in various ways is really crucial to remembering who we are and who we want to be and what kind of a world we want to be. I grew up in the age of anti-nuclear activism and what we called prefigurative politics in the 1980s, which is yes, you want to stop nuclear war and nuclear weapons, which means that you’re anti-war. You need to embody your values. And doing so is already a victory in this space. We have justice in this space. We have peace in this space. We have kindness and inclusion. So I think prefigurative politics still really holds for this. And it doesn’t mean you don’t have to be fierce, and you don’t have to fight.
JW: Great. Well, we need to figure out what happened in this election so we can do a better job next time and we have some time to do that now. Part of the Trump victory that I’m especially interested in was the support he continues to receive from white women. This year, the exit polls say 53% of white women voted for him pretty much the same as four years ago. And Kamala Harris focused some of her campaign on trying to win moderate white women away from Trump. You remember, she campaigned with Liz Cheney in the suburbs in the swing states where Nikki Haley got a significant proportion of the vote in the Republican primary. Now, a lot of our friends are criticizing her for doing that. What do you think?
RS: I’m struck by the fact that the last three elections, everyone wants to talk about white women, while white men have been the strongest constituency for the Republican party for a very long time, and the real shift we’ve seen is not among white women. It’s been among Latino men; white women have been splitting pretty evenly. And if you go into subcategories like evangelical women, women in a lot of the red states are hugely for the Republican party. If you look at Jewish women, college educated women, women in some of the blue states, we go hugely, I mean a bunch of those categories, we go hugely for the Democrats. And the gender gaps have been astounding. An early thing showed that there was a 20-point gap between men and women over 65; young men have gone way far to the right. And that brings us to something that I think is super important in this election.
The internet has become a giant cesspit of what we call the manosphere of misogyny, often wedded to white supremacy in this kind of soup of porn and pretending to advocate for men while constantly feeding their insecurity and resentments and really making white men feel like the most oppressed people on earth – just really driving a lot of this. And young white men, in 2016 – a cybersecurity expert came to give me a security upgrade and she said something so striking to me in those days, everyone was talking about how ISIS was recruiting young men online. And she said, “never mind Isis. The right worldwide is recruiting young men online” – and it’s super true. And of course, the internet was invented by, for the most part really nasty white men. And they let it become a place where hate misogyny, racism, homophobia, climate denial, anti-vaxxer stuff, conspiracy theories, cults like QAnon all flourish because anything that makes money is good by them.
And because a lot of them, like Elon Musk, uphold a lot of those beliefs. And I think the deep trouble we see in this election is the information economy, not the economy-economy. And I don’t know how Democrats win in that. Somebody said in 2012 that Mitt Romney won the 1960 election, aka, if we had the demographics of 1960, which was mostly white men, he would’ve done fabulously. I think Kamala Harris won the 2008 election if we’re in the climate Barack Obama had before Citizens United, before the unraveling of the Voting Rights Act, but also before the internet became such a malignant force of corruption of consciousness, truth, fact, she did pretty damn well going uphill as a late coming Black woman in this race. But the disinformation economy is so powerful right now.
JW: And we wonder how much of women’s vote for Trump was not a free choice. They were pressured by their MAGA husbands. Of course, that’s certainly true of evangelical women in their world, wifely submission is a duty commanded by, I guess Jesus himself. And it’s undoubtedly true of a lot of other women who are not evangelicals, but who have authoritarian husbands. I was interested that Democrats for the first time spoke openly about this, this time. Michelle Obama’s speech in Kalamazoo. You remember she said, “if you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember your vote is a private matter regardless of the political views of your partner, you get to choose. You get to use your judgment and cast your vote for yourself and the women in your life” – Michelle Obama. And there was that famous ad by Julia Roberts that said the same thing. I tried to find some evidence about how many women are subject to this. One in eight women told one poll they’ve secretly voted differently from their partners. This is not just differently, but differently and secretly. And another question in that survey was, “Did you vote the same as your partner to avoid conflict?” And 5% of the women said they had. What do you think about all this?
RS: Well, first of all, I found that Julia Roberts ad and the Michelle Obama speech really frustrating because now in a huge part of the country, people do not have the privacy of the voting booth. I think election day, going to your precinct, polling place, going to the booth is a great democratic right and ritual and it should be a holiday day and celebrated. And at least we get the little, “I Voted” stickers if we do that. But a huge number of people vote at home and your vote is not necessarily private there. You live in a dictatorial household with a household of what domestic violence experts call coercive control, which is not just the physical violence, but economic coercion, psychological coercion. I don’t know if it mounts up to change outcomes nationally, but when you say that 5% figure, maybe it does; but it has been something I started writing about in 2018 when I heard from a ton of door-to-door, get-out-the-vote canvassers for Democratic candidates that they were encountering women whose husbands didn’t know they were registered Democrat, husbands who wouldn’t let the wife speak to them, women who were visibly bullied, intimidated, afraid to talk.
It’s always really interesting. I’ve done a bunch of this, not huge amounts each time, but I’ve been doing it since 2004. You have this little moment of seeing inside a stranger’s home and just so many people have reported to me about views inside homes in which abuse is a reality. And so yeah, I don’t know how much that affects the vote and the outcome, but the figures you cite suggest it’s a real factor. And given that last time I checked the data, there’s a 1.5% difference between Trump and Harris. It could be that much. We know this stuff is really heated and we know that a lot more women are Democratic than men among white and Latino voters. I’d mostly heard about it with white voters, but I just talked to somebody who went door-to-door and saw exactly the same kind of coercion from Latino voters, although Black people keep voting for Kamala Harris. So all arguments about how it’s oh, economic whatever, or the working-class or whatever and doesn’t hold up. This was an election like all the other ones we’ve had in a long time, that’s very much about race and gender.
JW: You mentioned the victories of the abortion rights referenda. We had hoped those would bring out anti-Trump votes since of course Trump is the one who put the justices on the Supreme Court who abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. But Trump nevertheless won several of the states where the referenda passed; Arizona and Nevada, swing states, and more remarkably referenda for protecting abortion passed in Montana and in Missouri. Trump beat Harris in Montana by 21 points. He won in Missouri by 18 points. So I guess we have learned that voting for abortion rights does not necessarily mean voting for a woman for president. Why do you think that was?
RS: I don’t have a theory except the disinformation misinformation We’ve seen people did not seem to have a clear sense of what the candidates represented and were really caught up in weird stuff like trans girls in sports. And the Trump campaign spent almost $30 million running ads
JW: In Ohio. The ad said that Sherrod Brown favored gender changing surgery in public elementary schools. Completely ridiculous. But he lost the election.
RS: And I really just think people are swimming in just a sea of disinformation, misinformation and pure ignorance about stuff. There was a cute little video of a young woman, a college student in Arizona who thought Trump was protecting her abortion rights, so she voted for him. People do not really understand who did what, and what the consequences of electing this person or that person would be. There’s a famous meme or sort of line from 2015, “’I didn’t know leopards would eat MY face,’ said the woman who voted for the Leopards Eat Your Face party.” But I have to say I want to modify that for 2024, 9 years later. I don’t think a lot of people knew that this was the party that was going to eat their face. In a lot of cases, they wanted immigrants to be eaten by those leopards or whoever, they’re othering.
But truly, I don’t think a lot of people got it. It’s also really dumbfounding to me how readily immigrants get demonized. And there was a really interesting survey just before the election with Ipsos polling showing that the more misinformed you were about crime, immigration, and the economy, the more likely you were to be a Trump voter. Meaning people who have a clear grasp of the realities. Harris is the reality candidate. Trump is the delusion candidate. And I don’t know how we undo that. Elon Musk owns Twitter, Silicon Valley loves its disinformation, the legacy corporate media, the kind of Washington Post, NBC, CBS, New York Times, et cetera, wash Trump, soft-pedaled, what he’d done and what he threatened to do. I think other than individuals and kind of left media, thank you, The Nation. I think even people who think that they’re very well-educated, upper middle-class people whose egos are very flattered by The New York Times, they’re often really living in pretty profound distortion about reality.
JW: I want to add a couple of things. Yes, Trump won the election, but I want to emphasize how divided the country remains. It looks like when all the votes are counted, Trump will not have 50%, he’ll have like 49.5. So there are a lot of us. And look at the Republican’s biggest electoral victories in recent history. Reagan won 59% in 1984. Two years later, the Democrats retook Congress, 1972, George McGovern running against Nixon got only 37%. Two years after that, Watergate forced Nixon to resign. So one of the things you’ve often said is hope is based on the idea that we don’t know what’s going to happen and history shows, we have often been surprised when we thought things were at their darkest.
RS: Yeah, and you’re talking about older elections, but people did not make enough of the fact that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, lost by a landslide in 2020. I was hoping that tendency was going to continue, and it hasn’t, but I think we need to keep saying, shouting from the housetops that they do not have a majority. But as for hope in the dark, which is pro dark with dark being coming to terms with the fact we don’t know what’s going to happen. Heather Cox Richardson wrote a fantastic column about something. If you looked at the state of the United States in the early 1850s before Abraham Lincoln becomes president, the anti-slavery movement looks pretty powerless. It looks like the southern elitist are really going to dominate politics for the foreseeable future. And that really happens for a lot of the decade. And then something radical shifts.
Abraham Lincoln becomes president, the South secedes, they lose the Civil War, slavery is abolished and going even further back than the anti-slavery people in public and political life in the 1850s. I think of the abolitionists. I was at the Museum of American History, which is a fabulous place, and they had some of the crafts that women were selling at little bazaars in the 1840s to raise money for the abolitionist cause. Who the hell thought they could sew a pin cushion and abolish slavery? Except they did. Things change. They change again. What’s really shaped my life and my thinking is the resurgence of the indigenous people of the Americas in ways nobody really foresaw building power from the sixties on reclaiming land rights, language rights, pride, visibility, audibility. I went to a Land Back ceremony just before the election that was so beautiful and fulfilled a prophecy that someday the white people will come to ask us how to take care of the land.
But also seeing, so I talked about the Quincentennial of 1992 or instead of celebrating Columbus and we shifted radically how we thought of the history of this hemisphere, but also the 1989 revolutions; Nelson Mandela gets out of jail, apartheid begins to implode, and a man who is supposed to spend the rest of his life in prison becomes president of post-apartheid South Africa, which is not a country that ended up happily ever after, but it sure changed.
And then all the east bloc regimes toppled, totalitarianism, and with largely nonviolent means. And we just had the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, and that was astonishing, utterly unforeseen even by the participants, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ireland once a very conservative prim little Catholic country voting in referenda for both abortion rights and marriage equality. The world changes.
JW: For the last word. I like in your recent piece in The Guardian, your quote from Daniel Berrigan.
RS: Yeah. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest, who was such a powerful force in the anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies, said this very beautiful thing: “One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them, but you can do something. And the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”
And I had said the night of the election, along the same lines, that although we cannot save everything, that does not mean we can’t save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.
JW: “The difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.” Rebecca Solnit. You can read her online at theguardian.com. There’s no paywall. And her book, Hope in the Dark is available from Haymarket Books this week is a free download. You can get it at haymarketbooks.org, click on “free books’ and then go to Hope in the Dark.
RS: Let me just add — nine other free books in their anti-fascist library, and all the books at Haymarket are $2 this week as digital downloads. So Haymarket is awesome to work with.
JW: Rebecca, thank you for all your work — and thanks for talking with us today.
RS: My pleasure. Thank you, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about the bromance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Can it last? For that, we turn to David Nasaw. He’s written bestselling biographies of William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy. He’s an emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Grad Center. His most recent book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. We talked about it here. He writes for The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post and The Nation. We reached him today at home in Manhattan. David, welcome back.
David Nasaw: Thank you. Thank you.
JW: A lot of our friends did not watch Trump’s victory speech. What did he talk about?
DN: It was characteristic–it was disoriented, dislocated, rambling. There was a cursory mention, I guess somebody said, ‘You have to say something about your wife and your children.’ So he talked about them. Then he said something about his ‘feisty’ vice president. Then he said something about his campaign managers.
And then out of nowhere he ran this thing about Elon Musk. Much longer, the greatest part of the speech was about how wonderful Elon Musk was. Then he said, “Elon,” he said, “a star is born. You are a star.” And what was remarkable about it, it shows the hubris of this guy. I mean, Elon Musk dominated not only his own platform, but every other platform, what, for the last two years? He’s all over the place. You can’t escape him. But somehow the president-elect sort of made it clear by saying, “A star is born,” that his only importance, he had become a star, because he had supported Trump’s campaign.
JW: It’s not hard to see why Trump would say that he loves Musk. Musk spent more than a hundred million dollars of his own money helping Trump win. Musk paid for the field operation for the Trump campaign, so that Trump’s own campaign didn’t have to. And I assume that hundred million is why Trump says, “I love you, Elon.” It’s why Trump’s first statement after winning the election was, as you say, “A star is born. Elon.” And he also called him ‘a super genius.’ But you seem to think there’s a problem here.
DN: The problem is that you can’t fit two megalomaniacs into the same room. Elon Musk has, I think, invaded Mar-a-Lago. One report said that he wandered into the room when Trump was talking to Zelensky, and Trump waved him over and handed him the phone. Musk wants to be in the limelight. He wants to be the star. He can’t run for president, because he was born in South Africa, but he can be a president-maker and he doesn’t want anybody to take the limelight away from him. Well, Trump is not one to cede his place on center stage to anybody, and it’s inevitable that this is going to fall apart.
In 2016, Trump invited him to be on two advisory panels, and within months, Musk resigned, because he said to Trump, “You can’t get out of the Paris Climate Accords. You can’t just unilaterally withdraw.” Well, Trump unilaterally withdrew.
JW: Yeah, and Musk resigned.
DN: And there are going to be problems with China tariffs. I mean, Musk cannot continue to sell his Teslas at the price he’s selling them, without relying on the manufacture of significant parts in China.
JW: Now, you say it’s not just the peculiarities of Musk as the founder of Tesla, you are saying there’s a history here of very wealthy men, the richest men in America, and their relationships with presidents. And you’re speaking here as a professional.
DN: Yeah.
JW: You are a historian, a biographer—
DN: Thank you.
JW: — of Elon Musk’s predecessors, the genius businessman of America’s past. Let’s talk about them. The richest man in America once upon a time was Andrew Carnegie. He was a big Republican contributor when Theodore Roosevelt took office, and Carnegie had a lot of ideas about what Theodore Roosevelt should do. How did that go?
DN: It didn’t go well. Carnegie bombarded Roosevelt with his plans for peace, arbitration treaties between the major powers, disarmament treaties, an end to the building of bigger and bigger dreadnoughts and battleships. He knew World War I was coming, and he tried to get Teddy Roosevelt to intervene and to play peacemaker. Roosevelt listened. He received his entreaties in person by mail and in op-ed pieces in major newspapers, and then discarded him, threw them out. Not only did he throw them out, but behind Carnegie’s back, he made fun of the guy. He scorned him, laughed at him. Carnegie got absolutely nothing from Roosevelt, though he had been a major contributor, maybe the major contributor to the campaign.
JW: And then there was William Randolph Hearst, sort of the Musk of his day. First of all, how do Elon Musk and William Randolph Hearst compare in the political reach of their media empires?
DN: I think that Hearst’s reach was much greater. At some point during, in 1932, 1933, one out of four adults read a Hearst paper. He had a paper in every major American city except Philadelphia.
JW: And it wasn’t just newspapers.
DN: He had the most important magazines, with the largest circulation. He had radio stations, and he produced newsreels, weekly newsreels. So he was all over the place.
JW: Did Hearst have any suggestions for FDR when he took office?
DN: As soon as FDR took office, Hearst, who had been, if not his largest contributor, his next to largest contributor, sent him his recommendation for the cabinet, and then Hearst put together his own 11-point recovery plan, and sent it to the president.
JW: How did that go?
DN: It did not go well. Hearst heard back nothing. The president didn’t respond to his letters. The president didn’t respond to his intermediaries. The president didn’t call him, as he had thought would happen. The president didn’t invite him to Hyde Park or Warm Springs for private conversations. Nothing. Zero.
JW: And then there was Joseph Kennedy, not the world’s richest man, but a multimillionaire who connected FDR as a candidate to Hearst, and also was connected to Hollywood’s most powerful tycoons, and of course to Irish American voters. Did Joseph Kennedy think he should be part of FDR’s first administration?
DN: Joseph Kennedy was absolutely convinced that he was going to have to move to Washington, and he was ready to do so. He didn’t have a job. He was, according to Forbes Magazine, the eighth-richest man in the United States. And he was also, he believed and made it clear to everyone else, a genius, a genius businessman who understood the world. He understood media, he understood politics, he understood business, he understood the stock market. He thought he’d be the perfect Secretary of the Treasury. Didn’t work out that way.
JW: This brings us back to Musk. During the campaign, did he talk at all about wanting an appointment in the administration?
DN: What was remarkable about Musk, his chutzpah, his hubris, was that in August he interviewed Trump on X, his platform. There were delays of up to two hours. There were glitches all over the place. And about 50 minutes into it, while Trump was going on about, I don’t know what, I mean, he was just rambling on, Musk began to interrupt him. And Musk said, “The real problem here is inflation, and I know how to solve it. We need a Department of Government efficiency.”
And Trump ignored him.
Musk came back to it a second time. Musk came back to it a third time, and the third time he said, “I would be happy to head up this Department of Government efficiency.”
And suddenly a bell went off in Trump’s head and Trump said, “Hey, you are a great cutter. You’re the world’s greatest cutter,” meaning firing people who worked for him. He said, “That’d be great.” He said, “I love the idea.” So that was the beginning. It took another three weeks or another month before Trump publicly announced that he wanted Musk to head up his commission on government efficiency.
JW: And what has Musk said about how much of the federal budget he intends to cut?
DN: One of the reasons why Musk is never going into the administration in any significant role, although he may be an advisor to an advisory committee, Musk said that he’s going to cut $2 trillion from federal spending. Federal spending is now at $6 trillion. So what does that mean? If Musk is going to reach his $2 trillion cut, he’s got to cut into mandated spending. He’s got to cut Medicare, social security, debt payments, and defense, or he’s got to eliminate everything else the government does — from border control to aid to the police, to Pell grants, to you name it. It’s all got to go – $2 trillion is one third of federal spending.
Now, there’s no Republican in the world, no matter how MAGA, who’s going to agree to that, and then go back to his constituents and say, “Sorry.” He’s sorry. “We can’t run the federal prisons or the federal courts, or this and this, and this, and this, and this.”
JW: You quoted in your New York Times op-ed piece, a co-chairman from Trump’s transition team talking about this proposal of Musk’s. What did he say?
DN: He said, “Musk is not going to join the government.” Then there was a little bit of a pause– he didn’t say because his plan is ridiculously stupid– he said, “because of conflicts of interest.” He’d have to quit Tesla, and SpaceX, and he’s not going to do that. And then he said, “But he’s really going to help us out. He’s going to write software for the government and give it to us for free.” And this is the co-chair, this is the co-chair of the transition committee.
JW: Now just in case Trump does appoint Musk to something or other, what is Trump’s record of loyalties to his top appointees in his first term?
DN: Yeah. In his first term, everybody went. In the first year, he let go his National Security Advisor, his Chief of Staff, his Assistant Chief of Staff, his Press Secretary, his Deputy Press Secretary. And that was in the first couple of months. Subsequently, he replaced, remember Rex Tillerson?
JW: Oh, yeah.
DN: He was Secretary of State for a minute and a half. The Attorneys General, he went through. Remember Lance Priebus? He was the first Chief of Staff — gone. So, Trump is not known for loyalty to anyone, except his sons. Not to his wives, but to his sons he’s been very loyal.
JW: Of course, there’s a lot of other things Trump could do for Musk as president. I guess he could trade in all government vehicles for new Teslas. Then, there is Musk’s enthusiasm for Crypto. In his first term, Trump said Crypto was, “a scam,” “not money,” and “based on thin air.”
And now Elon Musk is pushing a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. He plugged this at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump, of course, has become an enthusiast for it. I’m a little confused, Doge, D-O-G-E, stands for Department of Government Efficiency, which is what Musk says he wants to head. Are you buying Dogecoin?
DN: No. Not today, not tomorrow.
Musk, whether he goes to Washington in some capacity or has Zoom calls with an advisory panel in Washington, his investment in Trump is going to pay off magnificently, because Musk survives on federal grants, his Tesla business, SpaceX. They would not be in the position they now are without government grants. Those government grants are going to increase dramatically. Musk says, and Trump agrees, “We’ve already been to the moon, who cares about the moon? Let’s go to Mars, and I’ll build the rockets to get us there. All I need is billions of dollars from the federal government.”
But as importantly, I think for Musk, Musk doesn’t want any strings attached to any of the money he gets from the federal government. He doesn’t want to be investigated by the SEC, by the Justice Department, by the 30 or more federal agencies have been investigating his practices. Every time a rocket goes off, rockets launched in Texas, it befouls the air and befouls the water. The EPA says, “You can’t do that.”
The FCC, the FTC, everybody investigates them. He wants to build his robo-taxis and wants to continue his production of self-driving Teslas, which are involved in all sorts of crashes without any oversight whatsoever; AI has to be regulated in some way. Musk doesn’t want that, and it’s not going to happen.
JW: So, Trump says Elon Musk is ‘a super-genius,’ but there’s room for only one genius at the Trump White House: a very stable genius.
David Nasaw wrote about “The Bromance That Cannot Last” for The New York Times. David, it’s always great to have you on the show.
DN: Thank you. A lot of fun.
