Musk , Trump, And The Truthteller

I note that Donald Trump is beginning to reinsert himself into public discourse, and as he does, espeically in his recent social media exchanges with Elon Musk, he's reminding me of his appeal. That appeal, of course, took him from long-shot vanity candidate for president in 2015 to his asymmetric defeat of Hillary the following year. The 2024 election is a long way away, but it's worth noting that the right people are already starting to get nervous. Here's wishful thinking from David Brooks:

[T]he 2024 presidential primaries could be wild. Sure, conventional candidates like the Republican Ron DeSantis or the Democrat Gavin Newsom may run for the nominations. But if the hunger for change is as strong as it is now, the climate will favor unconventional outsiders, the further outside the better. These sorts of oddball or unexpected candidates could set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that will make the existing party systems unstable.

Furthermore, if ever there was a moment ripe for a Ross Perot-like third candidate in the 2024 general election, this is that moment. There are efforts underway to prepare the way for a third candidate, and in this environment an outsider, with no ties to the status quo, who runs against the establishment and on the idea that we need to fundamentally fix the system — well, that person could wind up winning the presidency.

The one name he doesn't mention, of course, is the Unmentionable Orange, who strikes me as the once and future oddball or unexpected candidate who has already set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that have made the existing party systems unstable. What about Latins moving Republican, for instance? Isn't that Trump's doing? Brooks is hoping for a Ross Perot who'll look good but will wilt in the heat as Perot in fact did and who'll prove innocuous enough to stand aside for an inevitable Newsom or Romney.

Trump's appeal in 2016 was that he wasn't that guy. One thing that intrigues me about Trump as a public figure is that conventionally minded pundits accuse him of being a "narcissist", but under what we might call received narcissistic theory, Trump is a "truthteller", which in many ways is the opposite of a narcissist. From a typical discussion board:

Narc[issist]s don't like truthtellers, even when the truth teller remains silent and doesn't speak their truth.

The narc knows that you know, you have rumbled them, you have seen behind the facade and you know them for what they are.

Thus we have Trump truthtelling on Elon Musk:

When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican.

. . . Now Elon should focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess because he could owe $44 billion for something that’s perhaps worthless.

All I can say is it's hard to argue with the guy. Elon is getting to the end of his 15 minutes of fame, and he's turning into something of a weirdo. Trump, on the other hand, is what he's pretty consistently been as a public figure, a guy who doesn't beat around the bush, which is what many people find endearing while many others are uncomfortable. As an American archetype, he's a bit of Ishmael in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, or the noir detectives Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.

So far, it seems like both the Democrats and the Never Trumpers are desperate for someone, anyone they can put up as some sort of simulacrum of an honest outsider who of course will prove to be no such thing. Their problem is that no matter on whom they fixate on the outsider du jour, Trump's still outperforming everyone in the polls.

All the right people are nervous.