High on Ketamine, alter-ego feigning and non-compliant sounds like the perfect co-president to me. Let’s ride.
Maybe it's just the holiday spirit, but the more we see, the more I think it's possible Elon will be the thing that eviscerates Trump's presidency from the start. I thought this part of Heather Cox Richardson's update from yesterday was particularly on point:
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out on Saturday that what many of us have been calling a civil war in the MAGA movement is not the best way to look at the MAGA fight. Marshall points out that the 2024–2025 MAGA was mostly just an electoral machine built around Trump. In the past, he notes, MAGA never really had policies. Mostly, it was a vehicle for Trump’s grievance about the investigation into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and after his first impeachment, it
became about retribution. But now, as Marshall notes, Trump is “tired and on the way out,” and he never really cared about policy anyway: he ran for president for the purpose of staying out of jail and “lording it over his foes.”
What is going on now, Marshall says, is less a civil war than “a battle over the steering wheel.”
Trump absorbed groups into his coalition with the promise he would work for them, but their policies have always been contradictory. Now that it’s time for their payoff, not everyone can be appeased. So, will the Trump machine work for the MAGAs or the DOGEs…or even the Robert F. Kennedy “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) faction—which, as Marshall says, was “grafted on to the movement in the last months of the final stretch of the campaign for narrowly electoral reasons.” Today, Nathaniel Weixel of The Hill outlined how the MAHA faction is itself bitterly divided over issues like drugs to treat obesity.
Marshall concludes that, in any case, “[t]here’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.”
www.nytimes.com
