Lazy Caturday Reads: Elon’s Last Day: Really?

Catzilla poster

Good Afternoon!!

I hope this post will make some kind of sense, but I’m not that confident about it. I’m completely stressed out and exhausted. Last night I did not sleep at all. Now I’ll have to try to make it up with naps today.

I’ve had insomnia for years now, beginning after menopause. It got worse after Trump was elected in 2016, and now we’ve had nearly 10 years of this horrible man and his endless stupidity, my sleepless nights come more often.

Obviously, Trump’s second term has been much much worse than the first. He’s now surrounded by sycophants and not the so-called “adults in the room” who tried to check some of his worst impulses in his first term. He is openly enriching himself and his fellow billionaires. He’s pardoning violent criminals. Everything is awful. We are beginning to resemble Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. I don’t see how we ever repair this country’s reputation in the free world.

This is from Stephen Beschloss at America America: What Do You Hope For America?

France’s gift to America has stood majestically in New York harbor since 1886. The original idea for the Statue of Liberty grew out of the desire to exemplify the American ideals of liberty and freedom. Lady Liberty’s spiked crown was meant to symbolize rays of sun beaming out to the world. Her tablet was inscribed with July 4, 1776. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi placed a broken shackle and chains at her feet to represent the end of slavery.

For more than 140 years, she has held her torch high, providing a beacon to the world, an expression of freedom and a welcome to those in trouble. So has been the inspiring poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Collossus,” etched in bronze and placed at the pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Millions of arriving immigrants saw this symbol of compassion and hope for a better life with their own eyes. Millions more yearned to see it and experience its promise for themselves.

I have always taken pride in America’s commitment to immigration and its burgeoning diversity. I have done so knowing that our history has been fraught with conflict as bigotry and competition have often pitted Americans against newcomers. I’m still moved by Hakeem Jeffries’ first speech after becoming House Minority Leader in 2023. “We believe that in America our diversity is a strength. It is not a weakness. An economic strength, a competitive strength, a cultural strength,” he said, adding, “Out of many we are one. That’s what makes America a great country.”

I won’t recount now the myriad ways the current cruel and hostile regime is exploiting its power to try and force millions of migrants out of the country without due process. The daily stories of masked men without proper identification grabbing people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked cars is an intolerable horror.

Add to this the Supreme Court ruling yesterday, enabling the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal status for more than 530,000 immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—a humanitarian program created by the Biden administration in 2023 to address the peril they faced in their home countries. It’s hard to overstate the heartbreak and fear this ruling will cause, as all the previously protected people (adults and children) now face the possibility of being deported back to danger. We are all paying for decades of failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which has provided the conditions for a hateful demagogue to target migrants as a key reason for all that ails us.

Beschloss urges us to hold on to hope and not to give in to fear and despair. He asks us to think about what we hope for America.

…it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we’re fighting for; this tyrannical regime is hoping to replace our dreams with their nightmares. The more we keep alive the vision of the future we want, the more we will be motivated to make it happen.

I’m trying to hold on to hope. I really am. But it’s hard.

Here’s what I’m thinking about today: Elon Musk is leaving government and politics–supposedly.

Yesterday Elon Musk appeared in the Oval Office with a black eye and several other  small bruises on his face. He appeared to be stoned on something–he was doing that weird thing where he rolls his head around over and over again. He was also wearing a t-shire and rumpled jacket and a DOGE baseball cap. He was there because he is supposedly ending his role in the government and returning to running his own companies.

After the New York Times wrote about his drug use (see Dakinikat’s Friday post), a reporter asked about his use of ketamine. CBS News: Elon Musk lashes out in Oval Office when asked about report on his ketamine use.

During an Oval Office send-off Friday marking the end of his formal role with the Trump administration, Elon Musk lashed out when asked about a New York Times report alleging he was a frequent user of the drug ketamine during the 2024 campaign.

“The New York Times. Is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russiagate?” Musk asked while standing alongside President Trump, cutting off a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy about the Times. “Let’s move on.”

Musk’s remarks came on the same day that the Times reported he used ketamine — which can be used both recreationally and medically — as often as once a day in 2024. Musk has told people he took ketamine so frequently that it affected his bladder, and he has also used ecstasy and magic mushrooms at times, the paper said, citing unnamed sources….

Musk has said publicly he has a prescription for ketamine. But he told journalist Don Lemon last year he uses it infrequently, taking a “small amount once every other week” to help him get out of a “depressive mindstate.” He told Lemon he doesn’t feel he’s abused the drug, saying, “if you use too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done…and I have a lot of work.”

Yeah, right. He talks like every addict under the sun: “I can quit any time…”

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some Musk associates worry his reported drug use could harm his businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX, social network X and several other firms. The billionaire has brushed off any concerns about the impact on his companies, telling Lemon, “what matters is execution.”

Musk has said he has a top-secret security clearance, which typically requires drug testing.

But not for Trump’s buddies, of course.

And what about the black eye? Shawn McCreesh at The New York Times: A Black Eye at the White House: Did Somebody Punch Elon?

It was like metaphor turned reality.

After 130 days spent fighting the federal government, Elon Musk turned up with a black eye at the White House on Friday for his last day as a “special government employee.” If you squinted, you could see it: His right eye socket was puffy and empurpled. No doubt about it, that was a big, fat shiner.

His project in Washington more or less finished, he never came close to cutting the $1 trillion from the federal government he had promised. His businesses and his public image got somewhat battered, and now, apparently, so had his face.

Did somebody beat him up?

The list of possible suspects seemed long. An abridged lineup of people and constituencies currently unhappy with Mr. Musk includes: at least two of the many women with whom he has fathered children; pretty much the entire federal bureaucracy; his neighbors in a suburb of Austin, Texas; Tesla shareholders; old friends of his; Republicans on Capitol Hill; his 20-year-old daughter; all those people who have lit Teslas on fire; and even some Trump voters.

But Musk claimed his 5-year-old son did it.

“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Mr. Musk explained after a reporter asked him if he was OK.

Svetlana Petrova, Hokusai, Under-the-Mannen Bridge at-Fukagawa (Fat Cat Art)

It was an odd moment in a news conference that was quite odd to begin with. Moments earlier, Mr. Musk had angrily refused to engage with a question put to him about a new report in The New York Times detailing his drug use. Mr. Trump remained mostly mute as Mr. Musk batted back that question. Now the tech mogul was explaining why he looked beaten up….

Mr. Trump has spent a considerable amount of time around the little slugger over these last 130 days. He and Mr. Musk have even brought the child to sit ringside with them at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches. Mr. Trump thought about the explanation that was being offered for the black eye. “X could do it,” he concluded, sounding almost impressed. “If you knew X, he could do it.” The way the president said this, you’d never guess he was talking about a 5-year-old.

I call bullshit. There’s no way a 5-year old did that. Maybe it was Scott Bessent. Those two had at least one knock down, drag out fight. The Daily Mail: Insane moment Elon Musk ‘SHOVED’ Trump’s treasury secretary Scott Bessent during screaming match.

Elon Musk‘s swift departure from his signature Department of Government Efficiency and the White House was escalated by an outburst that turned violent, according to a high-profile insider.

Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told DailyMail.com that Musk’s turbulent time in the White House was marred when he physically ‘shoved’ 62-year-old Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after he was confronted over wild promises to save the administration ‘a trillion dollars’.

‘Scott Bessent called him out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” the prominent MAGA figure revealed.

‘And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him.

‘It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.’

Catzilla

Bannon said the physical altercation came as the two billionaires moved from the Oval Office to outside Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office, and then outside the office of the then National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.

‘Trump 100%’ sided with Bessent after the clash, he added. ‘I don’t think Bessent has any bad blood, but he’s got a job to do and he’s going to do it’.

The revelation of a confrontation between the pair was confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday….

The revelations of the Musk-Bessant clash follow an explosive New York Times report that alleged Musk was using a cocktail of drugs on the campaign trail including ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.

Bannon added that Musk also lost status in Trump’s orbit when it was leaked to the New York Times in March that the billionaire was preparing to receive top-secret military briefings on China, which Trump abruptly stopped.

he former chief strategist in Trump’s first administration said the mounting issues with DOGE and the China briefings led to Musk losing face in the White House.

Marina Hyde mocks Musk at The Guardian: So long, Elon: the cuts didn’t go to plan, but you completely shredded your reputation.

I can’t believe that Elon Musk is leaving Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote this week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after completely wiping out in the hotdog stand task.

Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target, even by his own estimations. Meanwhile, the president’s new tax bill is set to add $2.3tn to the deficit. I imagine Musk thought his government finale would be a spectacular extravaganza – “you’re welcome, Washington!” – involving 2,000 chainsaw-wielding chorus girls. Instead, it’s a tweet. And yes – we DO all still call them tweets.

Ironically, the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation. Think about it. He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to SpaceX or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.

Catzilla

But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”

Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool. You see it on Wall Street, where sea-beast financiers get manscaped by trophy wives who are no longer out of their league. You see it in Hollywood, where weird little guys become alpha movie producers. You see it in Bezos’s transformation from puffy-chinos-wearing, dress-down-Friday dweeb to Bilderberg Vin Diesel impersonator. What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.

More at the link.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that Musk is really leaving. Even Trump kept saying that yesterday, and Musk said he’ll continue advising Trump. From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (I don’t have a link, because I gots this on my email): Don’t Fall For Elon Inc.’s Press Campaign.

We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums, valedictories, friendly morality tales — about Elon Musk’s purported departure from service in the federal government. I’m going to note a couple quite unflattering pieces in a moment. But for now, I want to focus on the bulk of them, which tend to portray Musk as someone who tried to tame government spending but was simply over-matched by “Washington’s ways” and finally failed. You get the image of a guy who is chastened, heading back to his regular life, no match for Sodom any more than most of us would be.

Let me take this opportunity to say that this all has the look and feel of a well-orchestrated crisis communications job. If reporters out there really want to land a story, get me that story and I will be duly impressed. The point here is to start the project and process of unwinding the brand damage Musk has done to himself and all his companies by his antics over the last six months. After all, if he’s really cut his ties to Trump … well, maybe the whole bad story is just in the rearview mirror? And if he was really “defeated” by Washington, then maybe that’s punishment enough, right? I’m not saying that anyone really pissed at Musk or who now has a super low opinion of him buys that. But good crisis communications work recognizes the limits of the craft. An effort like this is more focused on laying the groundwork for a softening of feelings and impressions over time.

Catzilla, by Catzilla Studios at Deviant Art

You see it in the carefully planted stories and apparently tossed off quotes. Elon won’t be doing any more political giving. Elon doesn’t even like the Big, Beautiful bill. Elon agrees that Elon is chastened. I mean, our boy Elon is practically a Never Trumper now, right? It’s all fairly transparent.

I don’t, for starters, buy that Musk is really leaving government service at all, though the fact that a couple of his top lieutenants are also signing out of DOGE adds a bit more credibility to the claim. (We’ll have to keep on eye on that.) Musk was always the juice behind DOGE. Fear of him was what allowed twenty-something goofs to show up at government departments and be granted the keys to each kingdom. DOGE is probably institutionalized now to some degree. But not that much. And it’s not just the good guys who oppose DOGE. There are lots of factions on Team Bad Guy who want to take a slice out of him too. Remember, he used DOGE to scoop up lots of contracts. I doubt he wants to lose those. But others would like them, too. That means he’ll have to remain involved.

The bigger problem with this storyline is the idea that Musk failed. I so wish that were true. But it’s simply not. To believe that you’d need to buy the idea that the goal was to streamline the government and save a bunch of money as opposed to gut the parts of the government that Trump world and the Silicon Valley right view as enemies and do so in an at best extra-constitutional fashion because it would never be possible through constitutional means. He succeeded at doing quite a lot of that, at least for now. He wrecked whole sections of the government and scooped up a ton of government contracts which not only further feathered his nest but advances the privatization of the government. He also engaged in a still-too-little-understood effort to create a vast store of integrated private information on U.S. citizens. He accomplished a huge amount.

That makes sense to me. I wish Musk would go off into the sunset, but I don’t think we seen or heard the last of him.

That’s my contribution for today. There’s lots of other news, so feel free to post about it in the comments.