Emperor Musk
This week, a mile from the White House, Mary Beard, one of my favorite British historians, was holding forth about Roman emperors to a fascinated audience. “An autocrat,” she said, “is somebody who kills you when he’s being his most generous. You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is wonderful! But the generosity of the autocrat is always potentially lethal.”
Many of us have known that feeling. Many of us who have had the misfortune of moving in the corporate world know what lunches and meetings with corporate emperors are like. The nervous, obsequious smiles. The forced laughter at bad jokes. The giddy feeling of relief when you emerge from the meeting with your head still on your neck.
The extent to which Donald Trump’s cabinet has sold their souls to MAGA is an internal conversation that they alone can have, and we are not directly privy to it. But it’s easy to believe that the collection of mostly white men gathered for Wednesday’s cabinet meeting were appropriately nervous. External signs suggested they were.
Nervous laughter at bad jokes abounded. For once the biggest joke wasn’t Trump himself but Elon Musk, the only one standing. No doubt Musk found it amusing to stand over the mere mortals while wearing a black MAGA hat and a TECH SUPPORT t-shirt. He found it amusing to come to a solemn meeting in a state of undress, where the topic of discussion was the destruction of millions of American lives “for the good of the country.”
When I think of Musk in his t-shirt I wonder how Reinhard Heydrich would have been received had he shown up at the Wannsee Conference in his long johns. No doubt the attendees would have been just fine with it, outwardly anyway, just as Trump’s cabinet was outwardly just fine with Musk’s insulting attire.
The meeting began with a disgusting, obsequious prayer, offered up by Housing secretary Scott Turner. It included: “Thank you, God, for President Trump.” After the prayer Musk had to rub it in: he jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support,” flashing his absurd t-shirt. Everybody knew that wasn’t true, including Musk himself. Everybody knows he is, for the time being anyway, the most powerful man on earth. Everybody laughed obsequiously at the, ahem, “joke.” Trump appeared to be sleeping.
Trump later assured reporters, “They have a lot of respect for Elon, that he’s doing this, and some disagree a little bit but I will tell you for the most part I think everyone’s not only happy — they’re thrilled.” They’d better be. Otherwise the emperor’s apparent generosity could quickly turn lethal.
Musk reassured the cabinet that his recent “brilliant” (read: confused and haphazard) efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government will save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt. One can’t help but wonder, had any of them heard of Twitter? “It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” Musk proclaimed. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
No it won’t. Musk, in fact, has it backwards. America might very well go bankrupt if this lunacy continues with this madman in charge.
In a very short span of days, Musk has managed to prove beyond doubt that his illegal and Constitutionally unsanctioned department, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” is an unqualified disaster. He has used it to fire the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were difficult to contact because they could no longer access their work email accounts. DOGE falsely claimed to have saved eight BILLION dollars on a terminated contract that was actually worth only eight MILLION. Musk lied when he claimed the US spent fifty million dollars on condoms for Gaza. And it emerged this week that DOGE quietly deleted the top five items from its website’s public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be complete fabrications.
Despite all these public failures and f*ckups, Musk can show up to a cabinet meeting in a t-shirt and MAGA hat because he holds the only card that matters. The “Trump card,” if you will.
It doesn’t matter how dreadful you are at your job, it doesn’t matter how inappropriately inept you are at public speaking, it doesn’t matter how outrageously and insultingly dressed you are, if you have the imprimatur of Donald Trump, the cabinet and everybody else in MAGA will let you, metaphorically speaking, piss all over them. And they will laugh obsequiously and nervously at your stupid jokes while you do it.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.