Donald Trump unmasked
Just how ugly have things gotten within Trump world? On Friday night Elon Musk – who now thinks he’s the President of the Trump administration – told Trump’s base to “step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face” (his words, his capitalization) if they don’t agree with his desire to import workers for his own country. Of course Trump’s base doesn’t agree with the premise, because they’re delusional racists who think brown people are coming to take their jobs.
It’s not just that this impasse exists within Trump’s base. Every political coalition has its internal disagreements, some of them fierce and irreconcilable. It’s that Donald Trump has sat back and done nothing as Elon Musk and Trump’s base have proceeded to viciously rip each other to pieces in public. It’s embarrassing, it’s how coalitions fall apart, and it’s how an incoming President can lose all his political muscle before even setting foot in office.
Yet again, Trump does nothing. Well, he did do one thing on Saturday. He shared a graphic suggesting that E. Jean Carroll should be put in prison. That’s one way to try to fire up his trashy base, we suppose. But even then, this post was probably made by Trump’s babysitters and not by Trump himself. Trump, for his part, seems to have nothing to say at all. And that’s nothing short of remarkable.
For all the endless talk about how President Biden was supposedly cognitively impaired, Biden still showed up every day for four years and governed and showed leadership as needed and got major things accomplished. Yet Donald Trump is sitting there at Mar-a-Lago like it’s an assisted living facility, completely oblivious to the fact that 1) he’s President-elect of the United States and 2) the coalition that supplies him with his governing power is in full scale collapse. Trump isn’t doing anything.
So even as we rightly focus on the civil war within Trump’s coalition, and even as we rightly condemn Trump for threatening Carroll, let’s not lose track of the underlying story here. For all the bravado that Trump’s people are trying to put into his mouth, Trump is a senile blob who’s just sitting there while others do things in his name. Trump’s mask is off, and there’s nothing underneath it.
