Elon's "Muskrats," Trump's Time Bomb

Presidents Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.

--Maureen Dowd, "Musk’s Lost Boys and Trump’s Mean Girls," NYTimes

On some weeks, Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times is worth dipping in bronze:

Trump loves to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government.

Musk has employed his flying wedge of 20-something hipster lords of the new universe. “Muskrats,” career bureaucrats call them, who are themselves referred to as the “dinosaurs” by the Muskrats in their campaign to rifle every government computer system. Some of the Muskrats have become infamous: "A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym 'Big Balls' lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, 'I was racist before it was cool,' and 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,' and 'Normalize Indian hate.' Even though he is married to an Indian American, Vice President J.D. Vance rescued the 'kid,' as he called him, and helped him get his job back."

I realize the MAGA crowd loves all the crudest comments and cruelest decisions coming out of Trump 2.0 (now "squared by Musk," sez Maureen), but what about the sane middle? There is clearly no limit to the Trump wrecking ball, but when will it tear down something essential to the low-information voters? Surely that's happening already, the creeping realization that maybe total annihilation was not what they had in mind. And closer comes the mid-term elections of 2026 -- perhaps our last chance to keep the Republic against the madness of the king.

Messin' With Sasquatch

Nancy Pelosi “hit on something that is core to [Trump's] con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, ‘I’m not giving you the president’s tax returns.’ "

--Tim O'Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, quoted by Maureen Dowd

Thank You, Trump, for Getting Us On Our Toes

I don't usually quote Maureen Dowd -- I still bear a deep grudge for something she said about Howard Dean a millennium ago -- but I like "Trump's Gold Lining":

Donald Trump has indeed already made some of America Great Again.

Just not the aspects he intended.

He has breathed new zest into a wide range of things: feminism, liberalism, student activism, newspapers, cable news, protesters, bartenders, shrinks, Twitter, the A.C.L.U., “S.N.L.,” town halls, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Hannah Arendt, Stephen Colbert, Nordstrom, the Federalist Papers, separation of powers, division of church and state, athletes and coaches taking political stands and Frederick Douglass.

We might add to that list the rising resistance in North Carolina to the Republican General Assembly, since the biggest crowd in history showed up in Raleigh on Saturday to demand social justice and voting rights and equality under the law (HB2 is still a thing and is still hurting our state's economy).

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong under our Rollerball president, and the Republicans in Congress are holding that bag.

We Hope for Change

These may be some of the truer words written about the election just concluded:

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama.

--Maureen Dowd, 10 Nov. 2012

Strong Men Don't Compromise

Peggy (her real name) was a Republican who supported Barack Obama in 2008, disillusioned, as she was, "with her beloved W. over Iraq and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the disdain for bipartisanship." She pretty much sums up the feelings of a lot of Democrats:

...she thinks Obama has to get "a backbone" if he wants to lure her back to the fold. "He promised us everything, saying he would turn the country around, and he did nothing the first year," Peggy says. "He piddled around when he had 60 votes. He could have pushed through the health care bill but spent months haggling on it because he wanted to bring some Republicans on board. He was trying too hard to compromise when he didn't need the Republicans and they were never going to like him. Any idiot could see that.

"He could have gotten it through while Teddy Kennedy was still alive -- he owed the Kennedys something -- and then the bill was watered down....

Peggy is columnist Maureen Dowd's sister, featured in her column today, "When Peggy Left Barry."