I Don't Get The Panic Over Musk, Either

At The Hill:

Senate Republicans fear Elon Musk’s beef with President Trump could become a wild-card factor that could cost them seats in 2026 if Musk follows through on his threat to create a new political party to compete with the GOP.

GOP lawmakers note that third-party candidates have swung presidential and Senate races in the past and worry that Musk’s bid to establish an “America Party” is likely to peel off more Republicans than Democratic voters in key races.

First, I think "Senate Republicans" overrate the performance of third-party candidates. most recently John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992. According to Wikipedia,

Although the Carter campaign feared Anderson could be a spoiler, Anderson's campaign turned out to be "simply another option" for frustrated voters who had already decided not to back Carter for another term. Polls found that around 37% of Anderson voters favored Reagan as their second choice over Carter. Anderson did not carry a single precinct in the country.

. . . By the end of the campaign, much of Anderson's support came from college students. . . . Anderson capitalized on that by becoming a visiting professor at a series of universities[.]

Regarding Ross Perot in 1992,

Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler", post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, the 1992 election had several unique characteristics. Voters felt that economic conditions were worse than they actually were, which harmed Bush. A strong third-party candidate was a rare event. Liberals launched a backlash against 12 years of a conservative White House. The chief factor was Clinton's uniting his party, and winning over a number of heterogeneous groups. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight described the theory that Perot was a spoiler as "unlikely".

But there's a bigger problem: Trump, who got to know Musk well after the election, and whose instincts about people tend to be accurate, says Musk's recent public remarks mean he has gone "off the rails." Musk had media attention in the early months of the Trump administration, not necessarily all that favorable, since DOGE was often portrayed as arrogant and insensitive -- but to Musk, it was attention, and he basked in it, notwithstanding it was bad for the Tesla brand.

But on one hand, he was forced to end his role as a special government employee at the end of May, which inevitably took him out of the spotlight. He'd also begun to wear out his welcome with Trump's inner circle via episodes like his demand that all federal employees send a weekly e-mail documenting five bullet items covering what they'd done:

Federal workers across the U.S. government received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to account for what they did in the past week — and Elon Musk says they will lose their jobs if they don't respond.

. . . "Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week," Musk wrote on X, which he owns. The post ends: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

. . . But some agencies told employees to ignore the missive.

New FBI Director Kash Patel sent a message to the FBI workforce that the agency will review its own processes and employees should hold off on responding to the email from OPM. The FBI email was confirmed by an individual at the bureau who isn't authorized to speak publicly.

The State Department also let its employees know that the department plans to respond on their behalf, so employees aren't required to report their activities directly to the OPM email, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR.

Musk seems to think he's enitiled to operate this way, I assume because some key people think he's a genius. But not everyone agrees, even in Muskworld:

Linda Yaccarino announced on Wednesday that she's stepping down as CEO of X, offering little in the way of an explanation.

The link quotes a New York Times story behind a paywall that says,

Yaccarino’s exit caps a tumultuous period at X, which has been remade in Mr. Musk’s image since he bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Since then, Mr. Musk has shed three quarters of the company’s employees, loosened speech restrictions on the platform and wielded X as a political megaphone. Advertisers to X were at one point spooked by the changes and the social media company’s ad business declined.

In fact, Musk's purchase of X was an impulse buy that threatened disaster for his empire. Only rescue financing from Larry Ellison averted this, but the instability at X in many ways presaged Musk's time in the Trump administration. The link concluded,

The rest of the article essentially suggests Yaccarino's job was partly to handle Musk, who has "frequently made her job more difficult, including using expletives to tell advertisers that he would not be changing his ways.

Given what's gradually come out from Musk's time with the administration, he seems to be an unstable guy who often acts impulsively. The most recent episode was yesterday, when Musk responded to a post on X by Roger Stone noting that Steve Bannon had spent time with Epstein before his 2019 arrest by saying, "Bannon is in the Epstein files."

This appears to have been quickly deleted or made private, since I can't embed it (I'd love to see the letter from Bannon's attorney to Tesla's chief counsel). But it's an indication that despite what must be urgent demands from the Tesla and SpaceX boards that Musk focus on business, he can't resist keeping himself in the public eye, no matter how bad it makes him look:

Elon Musk’s favorability dropped again this past week amid his renewed feud with President Trump and move to launch a separate political party.

In the last week, Musk’s net favorability in the aggregate kept by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) dropped 3.4 points, falling just more than 20 points in the negative. The percentage that view the onetime Trump ally unfavorably reached its highest point of the president’s second term at 55.8 percent, while the percentage that view him favorably reached its lowest point yet, at 35.4 percent, as of Monday.

For Musk to have any success starting a third-party movement, he would need to assemble a team of savvy political advisers, especially if he intends to be its standard bearer -- but even there, notwithstanding anything else, he can't run for president himself a la John Anderson or Ross Perot, since he isn't a native-born US citizen. If he sonehow intends to have surrogates run for congressional seats, he's going to need people with good political instincts.

As Rush Limbaugh used to say responding to people who asked him why he didn't run for office, "I know how to get a radio audience, but I don't know how to get votes." Musk has a somewhat similar problem: it isn't completely clear if he knows how to run a business, because his bad instincts often get in the way. But it's even less clear if he knows how to get votes, and preliminary data suggests the one thing he's good at is wearing out his welcome.

I Don't Get The Epstein Conspiracy Theories

I've long been skeptical, most recently here in 2023, that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation, or indeed that he was a spy. Only in James Bond thrillers do spies draw attention to themselves. Beyond that, by the time of his death in 2019, he had been yestersday's news for more than a decade. Whether it was a sweetheart deal or not, his 2008 guilty plea to two sex offenses severely cramped his style. His Lolita Express plane had been grounded since 2016.

The continuing allegations from MAGA that Attorney General Bondi has been covering for the deep state are based in some measure on the idea that Epstein was highly successful as a blackmailer, with tapes of high-ranking people to prove it, and her failure to release any such tapes or incriminating evidence like a client list just proves those allegations. The problem is that Epstein's heyday was certainly before 2008, almost 20 years ago at this point, and most such names, even if they existed on an actual client list, would now be dead or faded from prominence.

I also suspect that the names most closely associated with Epstein, like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Prince Andrew, have already been outed, mostly from other sources. Yes, Bill Clinton was on the Lolita Express, but he'd already been exposed by women like Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky. The same with Bill Gates: any escapades with Epstein had little or nothing to do with his divorce or his quiet departure from Microsoft. The same applies to Prince Andrew, whose various affairs and troubled marriage had been controversial throughout his adult life, though his association with Epstein didn't help at all.

As I've been saying for quite a while, Trump's judgment in the Epstein matter has been underrated. At the time of Epstein's death, Trump said he hadn't spoken to Epstein for 15 years, and he had apparently barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after his 2008 guilty plea. Just this week, in response to complaints about Attorney General Bondi's claim that there was no Epstein client list, Trump said,

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.

. . . The comments appeared to signal continued job security for Bondi and amounted to a striking rebuke of members of Trump’s base who have called for her resignation and mocked her for what they believe to be her failed commitment to release incriminating files from the Epstein investigation.

I think this reflects an understanding that any Epstein client list, if it existed, would be nothing but old news. If Epstein's heyday was before his 2008 guilty plea, then the biggest and most current names might be from the Dubya administration. Any cabinet secretaries from then, if their names turned up, would excite litle more than a yawn. Celebrities? I asked the web who were the biggest male celebrities in 2005 and got Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, George Clooney, and Tom Cruise. Frankly, I doubt any of them needed Epstein to find what they wanted. My bet is any actual client list would just be cheesy has-beens.

So if Epstein wasn't a blackmailer or a spy, how did he make his money? We can be pretty sure that part of it came from Les Wexner:

In a 2019 New York Times exposé titled “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women,” a team of journalists found that in the 1990s Epstein served as an adviser to Les Wexner, Victoria’s Secret chief executive. (Wexner stepped down from the company in 2020.)

. . . The two were introduced by insurance executive Robert Meister in the mid-to-late 1980s, and the New York Times story noted that Wexner eventually “authorized [Epstein] to borrow money on his behalf, to sign his tax returns, to hire people, and to make acquisitions.”

A number of Epstein's estates appear to have belonged to Wexner but at some point were transferred to Epstein, for instance. Another source of income appears to have been via brokering donations to Harvard and MIT.

Harvard University received nearly $9m in donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before his 2008 guilty plea to sex charges, but rejected a proposed gift after his conviction, according to the institution’s president, Lawrence Bacow.

The largest of Epstein’s gifts to the university was $6.5m in 2003 to support the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Other gifts totaled about $2.4m. Epstein did not attend Harvard.

. . . The disclosure that Harvard declined Epstein’s contributions after he was convicted for soliciting a minor are in marked contrast to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its Media Lab, which has been rocked by revelations that it accepted more than $7.5m in donations from Epstein or people connected to the university through him after his conviction.

Amid a review of Epstein donations to MIT, the university’s president, Rafael Reif, acknowledged Thursday he apparently thanked Epstein in a note in 2012 in response to one donation.

Bacow, in his message, also noted that Harvard had recently learned that Stephen Kosslyn, a former faculty member and a beneficiary of Epstein’s philanthropy, had designated Epstein as a visiting fellow in the psychology department in 2005.

“We are seeking to learn more about the nature of that appointment from Dr Kosslyn, who no longer works at the university,” Bacow said.

As best I can determine, and as implied in the reference to MIT at the link, Epstein's strategy appears to have been to bundle donations to Harvard and MIT from third parties, apparently pitching his influence at the universities that might help the donors to get whatever else they needed there. In return, Epstein took some sort of a skim or management fee, so that figures like up to $9 million to Harvard probably represaent a larger amount paid to Epstein from third parties.

So the one worthwhile question remaining about Epstein is how he made his money, but as time goes on, it's less and less interesting. In my view, he definitely wasn't a spy, and anything he had on some prominent person would by 2019 have been stale information, not worth having him killed. Exactly how he snookered Harvard and MIT might be fun to learn, but those institutions are already in much bigger and much more current trouble.

Bondi and Patel have dropped Epstein and are now after Comey and Brennan. Trump clearly thinks this is a better use of everyone's time.

Just War Theory And The Book Of Jonah

Last month I looked at the objections of just war theorists, especially the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, to President Trump's threats against Iran in the runup to the raid on its nuclear sites. The fact that the raid proved closely targeted and didn't lead to further US involvement seems so far to have kept Prof Feser from expressing further objections. But I keep running into scriptural problems that make me wonder if just war theorists have all the answers.

For instance, just this past Sunday's gospel reading, Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20 contains a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, which I've compared in the link to the destruction of a nuclear attack:

8 And into what city soever you enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you.

9 And heal the sick that are therein, and say to them: The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.

10 But into whatsoever city you enter, and they receive you not, going forth into the streets thereof, say:

11 Even the very dust of your city that cleaveth to us, we wipe off against you. Yet know this, that the kingdom of God is at hand.

12 I say to you, it shall be more tolerable at that day for Sodom, than for that city.

But this reminded me of the task the Almighty put to Jonah when He sent him to warn Nineveh in Jonah 3: 1-4:

1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time:

2 "Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you."

3 So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the LORD'S bidding. Now Nineveh was an enormously large city; it took three days to go through it.

4 Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day's walk announcing, "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,"

The NAB has a footnote here that makes the context plain:

[4] Shall be destroyed: the Hebrew expression reminds the reader of the "overthrowing" of the wicked cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, by a special act of God.

As it happens, both the citizens and the king of Nineveh saw the error of their ways, repented, fasted, and wore sackcloth and ashes. By the end of the chapter:

10 When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.

As far as I've been able to determine, the only cities in scripture that the Almighty Himself destroyed were four of the five cities of the plain in Genesis 14, Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim. God spared Zoar, the fifth. This leaves out Jericho and an unspecified number of other Canaanite cities that God instructed Joshua to destroy, burning them to the ground and killing all the men, women, children, and animals.

But now we see at least two threats elsewhere in scripture, the one in Luke 10: 12 from Jesus Himself, and the one in Jonah 3: 2-4, from God through Jonah, promising destruction equivalent to Sodom and Gomorrah. But Prof Feser finds even threats of mass destruction immoral:

As they routinely do, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at face value, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinking out loud” rather than as final policy decisions. But this helps their case not at all. War is, needless to say, an enterprise of enormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness. Even speaking about the possibility must be done with great caution. (Think of the chaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly ten million people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.) A president who is instead prone to woolly thinking and flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment about them cannot be trusted. (And as I have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself to have unsound judgment about such things.)

In that paragraph, he links to an entry on his blog criticizing Trump's thinking-out-loud over annexing Greenland:

Even if Trump is merely bluffing, the point of the bluff would be to frighten Denmark and Greenland into making an agreement they would not otherwise be willing to make. But this is sheer extortion and gangsterism. Moral common sense and traditional natural law theory alike hold that an agreement cannot be licit or binding if made under such unjust duress.

But how do we differentiate the threat God has instructed Jonah to make to Nineveh -- straighen up or I will, in effect, nuke you -- from the putative, much vaguer threat Trump is making against Greenland and Denmnark, sell Greenland to the US, or else. Aren't both extortionate? Let's recall that to a Thomist like Prof Feser, scripture is inerrant, and God is perfect. God is threatening Nineveh with nuclear-equivalent destruction, as is Jesus, who threatens worse for any city that rejects His messengers. I can only assume Prof Feaser will argue that in these cases, God's cause is just, and the threats are justified,when they would be evil and immoral if made by Trump or Truman.

But isn't the whole point of the Jonah story the long and difficult struggle Jonah undertakes in recognizing both the underlying justice of God's cause and, more important, the need for him to play a role in bringing it about? And let's not forget that even though Jonah finally does what he's told, he goes to Nineveh and delivers the message, but then he gets angry when Nineveh hears the threat, cleans up its act, and God relents! A footnote in the NAB says,

Jonah is selfish in bemoaning his personal loss of a shady gourd plant without any concern over the threat of loss of life to the Ninevites through the destruction of their city. If God in his kindness provided the plant for his prophet without the latter's effort or merit, how much more is he disposed to show love and mercy toward all men, Jew and Gentile, when they repent of their sins and implore his pardon! God's providence is also shown here to extend even to animals.

By the end of the book, Jonah still hasn't quite figured out God's will. The only thing I can conclude is that on one hand, if you're destroying cities or even threatening to do it, if it's in a juat cause, it's neither evil nor immoral. God or His designees do this in scripture. On the other side of the coin, it's not a simple thing to recognize your cause is just. Jonah may well wrestle with all the implications of his own story for the rest of his life. Isn't this a major point of Jonah?

Just war theorists want to sit in judgment over Truman or Trump without recognizing that both are in difficult, highly ambiguous situations, certainly in Truman's case not far from being in the belly of the great fish. But also, in Trump's case, Prof Feser consistently criticizes Trump for seeming to be about to do things he never actually does -- and so far, he hasn't gotten around to analyzing what he may have missed in doing so.

Treasury Secretary Bessent Sees Musk The Same Way I Do

As I did yesterday, I keep saying that Elon Musk's main problem is with the boards of directors for each of his companies. With everything he's done since November, he's been digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. Yesterday in an interview with Dana Bash, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said,

BASH: He (Musk) announced this weekend that he is starting a new political party. Does this worry the Trump Administration?

BESSENT: Look, the principles of DOGE were popular. If you looked at the polling, Elon was not. The Boards of Directors at his various companies wanted him to come back and run his companies, which he is better at than anyone.

So, I imagine those Board of Directors did not like this announcement yesterday and will be encouraging him to focus on his business activities, not his political activities,

It's worth revisiting a story from a month ago that reported a physical altercation between Musk and Bessent:

According to [Trump insider Steve] Bannon, Bessent dared to say that the billionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was a failure, since Musk didn't root out the $1 trillion in wasteful and fraudulent federal spending he promised he would.

'Scott said, "You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,"' Bannon said.

That's when Musk body-checked Bessent, who hit the world's richest man right back, according to Bannon.

Reaction from the financial world to Musk's announcement of a new third party was immediate:

Azoria—a prominent investment firm with deep ties to tech and AI innovation—has yanked its support from Tesla ahead of a planned ETF launch, citing CEO Elon Musk’s surprise announcement that he is launching a new national political party, “The America Party.”

The Azoria Tesla Convexity ETF, which was set to go public next week, would have offered investors a strategic vehicle for exposure to Tesla’s high-growth potential.

But that plan is now shelved indefinitely. According to Azoria CEO James T. Fishback, the abrupt decision was made in “direct response” to Musk’s political pivot, which Fishback says undermines confidence in Musk’s leadership at Tesla.

Fishback also released a formal letter addressed to Robyn Denholm, Chair of Tesla’s Board of Directors, calling on the board to immediately evaluate Musk’s political ambitions and whether they are compatible with his duties as Tesla’s CEO.

The letter, dated July 5, bluntly states that a ‘political party not only fails to complement Tesla’s mission—it actively undermines it.’

Last week I noted that Tesla owners have several choices of bumper sticker they can put on their cars to tell potential vandals that although they'd bought a Tesla, they don't support Musk -- but this is hardly a sure remedy. The best option is not to buy a Tesla and expose it to the risk.

I first saw a Rivian more than a year ago, in the Kaiser parking lot. It was headed to the physicians' parking area, and that struck me as about right, a Rivian is a doctor's high-end electric car. Since then, I've seen very few Rivians on the street, but a fair number of Teslas. All of a sudden, just yesterday, we saw two Rivians on our way to mass, but no Teslas.

It stands to reason that people in the market for a new high-end electric car are going to get a Rivian, not a Tesla. Musk has done more for the Rivian brand thsn any conventional endorser. The Tesla board must be painfully aware of this. As usual, Trump shows insight:

I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely “off the rails,” essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.

. . . No more EV Mandate. I have campaigned on this for two years and, quite honestly, when Elon gave me his total and unquestioned Endorsement, I asked him whether or not he knew that I was going to terminate the EV Mandate – It was in every speech I made, and in every conversation I had. He said he had no problems with that – I was very surprised!

I suspect Secretary Bessent has had Musk's number from the start -- he's a fraud. I've always had a sense that the other things we know about Musk -- his really weird sex life involving farming in vitro embryos with his various wives and girlfriends out to surrogate mothers, with at least 14 children he's acknowledged and apparently many more he hasn't, plus his unworkable crackpot ideas of colonizing and terraforming Mars, simply aren't compatible with the mindset of a responsible business manager, much less a political leader.

I can only think Secretary Bessent was being nice when he said Musk was "better. . . than anyone" at running his companies. We have the case of Musk spending a quarter billion supporting Trump, whose policies are bad for Tesla's business model, and expecting things somehow to work out in the end. But on top of that, he's a businessman who's suddently become a controversial publicity hound, when someone at his level should be staying out of the news, not making it. The last guy like that in the auto business was John DeLorean.

I think that's about where Musk will wind up, and actually pretty quickly.

The Picture Says It All

Elon Musk basically made one halfway-smart political call, and that was when he donated rouughy $277 million to the 2024 Republican campaigns. He then briefly recognized that he wasn't cut out for politics:

Wisconsin could go down as billionaire Elon Musk’s last big spend on a political campaign.

And it was a flop.

Musk, the richest person in the world, said May 20 that he would be spending less on political campaigns. The announcement came as Musk is stepping back from his role in the Trump administration, saying he will spend more time focused on his businesses, and just seven weeks after the candidate he backed in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race lost by 10 percentage points.

. . . Musk was all-in on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, even making a personal appearance in Green Bay the weekend before the election wearing a cheesehead hat — popular with fans of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers — and personally handing out checks for $1 million to supporters. It was an extension of Musk’s high-profile role in the presidential race, where he campaigned alongside Trump and headlined some of his own rallies.

. . . But his appearance — and money — didn’t work.

The candidate Musk backed lost Brown County, the home of Green Bay, by 3 percentage points, going on to lose statewide by more than three times that margin.

After the defeat, Musk has said little publicly about the race and his involvement in it. His popularity has also plummeted.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll taken two weeks after the Wisconsin court election found that just 33% of adults had a favorable view of the Tesla CEO, down from 41% in December.

Subsequent disagreements with Trump have hurt him in the pocketbook:

Tesla (TSLA) shares have risen this week as investors may be moving past the fiery public spat between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump.

The electric vehicle maker’s shares are up 10% this week, recouping more than half of the ground lost last week in the wake of Trump and Musk’s social media shots at one another. The back and forth started as an argument over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” taxation-and-spending bill but spiraled into a now-deleted post in which Musk accused Trump of being in the "Epstein files," referencing the late convicted sex trafficker. The public fight ended up costing Tesla a spot in the illustrious $1 trillion market capitalization club with a one-day drop of more than $150 billion.

. . . Tesla's stock has been on a roller coaster ride this year. Shares shed more than 35% of their value in the first quarter as sales slumped, tariffs hit the stock market, and controversy swirled around Musk. They staged a comeback in April and May after Musk said he would step back from Washington.

But like a guy with a gambling habit who can't stay out of the casino, Musk is back:

Elon Musk, the richest man with visions of grandeur, has announced the creation of a new political party, “The America Party”.

With President Donald Trump capturing the overwhelming majority of middle-America within the new MAGA movement; essentially taking over the Republican party apparatus, I would consider that Musk’s assembly will likely be a collection of never-trumpers, alligator emojis and disgruntled former Republicans.

At this point, I see a partial, but definitely not complete, similarity with Ross Perot, who ran an independent campaign for president in 1992.

Ross Perot had never been elected to public office, but he ran several successful corporations and was involved in public affairs for decades. . . . Perot joined IBM as a salesman. He surpassed his one-year sales quota in just two weeks. After the company ignored his idea for electronic storage, he founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, which was then contracted by the United States government to store Medicare records. Perot earned a fortune with the company, and by 1968 was named by Fortune as the "fastest, richest Texan". . . . Perot eventually sold his company to General Motors in 1984 for $2.55 billion, and founded Perot Systems in 1988. By 1992, his fortune was judged to be $3 billion (~$5.85 billion in 2023).

The similarities are that both Musk and Perot were political novices, both had become rich beyond the dreams of avarice in tech -- largely with government money -- neither had much personal charisma, and both proved unstable under the pressures of public life. Perot's poll numbers began to slip in July 1992, and senior advisers were resigning. On July 16,

Perot announced on Larry King Live that he would not seek the presidency. . . . He asked his supporters to look for other candidates to nominate for the race, and formed United We Stand to "influence the debate". At this point, Perot had spent $12 million of his own money on the race. Bill Hillsman, who produced a few unaired advertisements for the campaign, wrote that Perot's withdrawal was a tactic to find temporary relief from the press.

. . . On October 1, Perot re-entered the presidential race, with a desire to further explain his economic plans to the American people. The New York Times commented that Perot's "chances of winning are much less than when he quit in July. His only dim practical hope is to confuse and destabilize the contest."

There's one key difference between Perot and Musk: Perot, a native-born US citizen, was eligible to become president, and he was the figurehead of his own third party. Musk isn't a native-born US citizen and can't run for president, but even if he were, his public persona is even more eccentric and unstable than Perot's. But as w3ith Perot, the more people see of him and learn about him, the less they like him.

But an additional problem is that Trump had already claimed whatever political legacy Perot had left.

The populist Tea Party movement and supporters of President Donald Trump have both been compared to Perot advocates. Upon Perot's death from leukemia in 2019, Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris reflected upon Perot's 1992 campaign and referred to him as the "father of Trump" due to Trump's 2016 presidential victory as, like Perot, a populist businessman without traditional political experience.

Trump, unlike Musk or Perot, has personal charisma and the ability to inspire trust in the electorate. His political instincts are far better. And if people were never quite sure what Perot wanted to accomplish, it's even less certain with Musk, whose plans for the future include terraforming Mars and impregnating hundreds, if not thousands, of women with his own DNA -- but the one thing that's certain is he can never be president, which in my view is all to the good.

The real question is how much longer the Tesla and SpaceX boards will put up with him.

Kaitlan Collins Buys A Pied-à-terre On Nantucket

Last night I had what I can only call a medley or amalgam of every dumb recurring dream or nightmare I've ever had, probably familiar to many people, the one where I went to school in my bathrobe, the one where I can't find where my car is parked, the one where I need to use the bathroom but can't find one anywhere, the similar one where I need to find an elevator, the one where I signed up for a course, never bought the books and never showed up for class, but now it's almost time for finals -- and probably half a dozen others.

In fact, I kept telling myself in the dream, "Oh, no, this isn't a dream!", and that meant I was going to have to tell my mother I had to drop out of school. When I woke up and realized it was in fact a dream, I was truly astonished. I went searching on the web for interpretations of what these things meant, and I learned that I was insecure, or that I was preparing for new experiences, or that I was reassimilating my personality, none of which seemed to mean a thing.

As part of the dream, each time a new sequence came up, I kept asking myself, "I wonder what triggered that one?", and I kept recognizing a guy with a suitcase in a previous scene, or something like that, so it was all a little like the Salvador Dali dream scene in Hitchcock's Spellbound. But then, after I woke up, I kept asking myself the same question, "I wonder what triggered that one?" I finaly came up with an answer: CNN staffers livid after Kaitlan Collins buys vacation home on luxurious island getaway.

I realized that Kaitlan Collins's unnatural smirk had been haunting me for days. This simply isn't a real face, it's not a normal expression in repose. It can only be the result of bad plastic surgery or, as I wondered a short while ago, maybe she'd been making a face like that as a child, her mother had warned her that one day it was going to stick like that, and this had finally happened. But it's also the sort of face you see in a dream. Let's also note the dreamlike quality of the story at the link:

The turmoil over Collins' lavish new island getaway came as an anonymous source told Fox News there are 'tears on the horizon' for the left-leaning news network.

Warner Bros. Discovery's shock split into two distinctive companies is a sign the jobs and hefty salaries of CNN's top talent are on the line, media insiders have warned.

. . . Streaming & Studios' domain will be Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max.

Global Networks, on the other hand, will be news focused, assuming CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery, among other programming.

CEO David Zaslav will take on the leading role of the Streaming & Studios company, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will become the President of Global Networks.

. . . 'Inevitably, Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost,' Dylan Byers, a former CNN reporter who now works for Puck, wrote in an opinion piece.

'This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?'

In other words, CNN can fire Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, and Wolf Blitzer, but they can keep Kaitlan Collins, an even more mediocre figure, who will appeal to the same audience for much less money. Not only that, but Collins herself has gamed this out: a normal person looking at potential layoffs by their employer might hesitate before pulling the trigger on a multimillion-dollar vacation home. But Collins figures it's the top-dollar talent who'll be on the way out, not her.

This also resonates with the actual psychology of corporate downsizing. When the committee of people who decide who goes and who stays gets together, they look at the candidates one by one and say, "Smith? He doesn't do much, but we know nobody else would hire him. We can't lay him off." On the other hand, they look at a top performer and say, "Johnson? Heck, he could get a job anywhere. He'll land on his feet. He's the one we can let go and not feel bad about it."

Thus Kaitlan Collins. When I did a web search on her, the problem of her smirk kept surfacing:

In 2023, Reddit users questioned if Collins ever had work done on her lips, citing their sharp corners. "To me her lips are so distracting the way they are always curled up on the ends," one Reddit user wrote. "Is it natural or manufactured?" Other commenters chimed with their thoughts about Collins' possible alterations to her appearance, adding that she might have had cosmetic surgery in areas like her mouth and nose. "There is definitely something totally weird about her lips," another user said. "To me at least the edges of her lips have what I would call little 'winglets' like you see at the end of the wings on a commercial plane. And that nose is really strange."

This brings me to how someone like that could be allowed in front of the cameras at a major network. This past year, there was a pseudo-controversy on On Patrol: Live over whether Dan Abrams, who had started a beard and was beginning to look distinguished in a rabbinical way, should shave it off. Sean "Sticks" Larkin, a popular alumnus of the show, reappeared to deliver the message, almost certainly from mahogany row, which went something like this: "The little I've learned about television, Dan, is that there are three key ingredients, lighting, makeup, and camera angle. It's gonna have to go." And of course, it did.

So how could television executives allow someone with a face like Kaitlan Collins, taking key considerations like lighting, makeup, and camera angle into consideration, in front of the camera? It somehow has to do with the nature of mediocrity, I have a sense. They can always fire the big-ticket talking heads, but they'll stick with mediocrity. At least until they can't -- but mediocrity will still get a long run. My dream told me that.

Very Stable Genius

🚨 Van Jones DROPS A TRUTH BOMB: “Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot… Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all the critics… this dude is a phenomenal—he is the most powerful human on earth.” 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/dUAKvYUMGm

— TRUMP ARMY (@TRUMP_ARMY_) May 18, 2025

I think we're at the beginning of a remarkable reappraisal of Donald Trump, although there's been a fairly consistent minority opinion that Trump is a "genius" since his first term. I asked, the web, "Is Trunp smart?" It returned, among others, this link at Politico from 2020:

What we learned from Trump’s taxes does suggest he possesses an astonishing gift which could reasonably be called “genius” — if you accept that as a descriptive word rather than a term of praise.

Genius, in this context, means something more than “very smart.” It means an ability to see connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional ways do not see. There are some people who possess genius of a certain type in certain arenas who might actually qualify as kind of dumb when it comes to more conventional intelligence of the sort measured in conventional arenas.

Trump’s genius, as illuminated by the Times, isn’t simply for self-promotion but for harnessing self-promotion to a coherent and comprehensive strategy for personal gain. . . . It is a simple fact that in this intersection of self-promotion, self-enrichment, and self-protection Trump has a mind that operates at a different level than most, and he has used it to fashion a historic career.

But from The New Republic the same year:

From the earliest days of his administration, it has been obvious to everyone who has come in direct contact with him that Trump knows very, very little about any policy issue or even how the federal government operates. Among those most alarmed by Trump’s ignorance and incompetence were those in the military and intelligence community. After a National Security Council meeting on January 19, 2018, Defense Secretary James Mattis told aides that Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”

. . . Trump’s mental failings are also painfully clear to foreign diplomats, who are professionally obligated to be frank and clear-eyed about him. Among themselves, diplomats early on shared tips on meeting with Trump: Don’t assume he knows anything about your country, flatter his ego, and be mindful of his extremely short attention span.

. . . In July 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” for his bungling and incompetence. That same month, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly dismissed Trump as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner” at a private dinner. In 2018, White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” on several occasions. A long list of other close Trump advisers have also disparaged his intelligence.

So is Trump basically just a successful narcissist? The problem is that narcissists wear out their welcome:

[Researchers] did a survey of people asking them what behaviors they believed increase their status in a group. People who scored low on the [ Narcissism Personality Inventory] tended to list behaviors in which they treated other people nicely. People who scored high on the NPI tended to list behaviors that got them noticed like being arrogant or pointing out other people’s weaknesses. These more aggressive behaviors may in fact bring people status in the short-term, but that status tends to erode over the long-term.

This pattern may be one reason why narcissists often move from one group to another in organizations. They can make themselves noticed quickly, but their behavior leads them to wear out their welcome quickly. And because narcissists are sensitive to when their status is declining, they can recognize when it is time to find a new group.

On one hand, Trump certainly displays behaviors like being arrogant or pointing out other people’s weaknesses. On the other, particularly after comparing Trump to Biden, the electorate appears to have decided it could live with this, and it reelected him. In fact, there seems to be an emerging consensus that Trump has a unique talent for "harnessing self-promotion to a coherent and comprehensive strategy for personal gain", if in fact personal gain is his objective.

Let's take the case of his post-election bromance with Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world. Mostly at Trump's instigation, Musk donated something like $277 million to his and other Republicans' 2024 campaigns, and apparently as a reward, he spent some weeks in Trump's close company at Mar-a-Lago and the White House. But when it mattered, Trump didn't give him the one big thing he wanted, continuation of electric vehicle subsidies, saying simply that his position against them was well known from the start.

I can only see this as extremely skillful manipulation, and it's almost amusing to see Musk belatedly waking up to the recognition that he's been used. And in fact, Tim Walz's chracterization of Musk, “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around skipping like a dipshit", wasn't far off the mark. Trump set Musk up for this, letting him get carried away with his own ego, in return for a quarter billion dollars, and all he got was the oppurtunity to jump around on a stage. His boards aren't as impressed.

The interpersonal insight Trump is displaying in this episode alone is something unprecedented. The Trump-as-narcissist narrative is going to have to be dropped.