Unraveling in real time
Donald Trump has been unraveling for awhile now. Instead of using the past two years to try to figure out how to save himself from prison, he’s instead wasted the past two years trying to convince himself that he secretly won in 2020 and that he’s somehow more powerful than ever. As a result he’s now on the verge of criminal indictment for espionage, among other charges, and he has no future to speak of. What’s remarkable is that he’s not the only wealthy villain who’s now unraveling right in front of us.
Kanye West has been playing the villain for a few years now, and mostly getting away with it unscathed. But recently he’s ramped up his deranged behavior to the point that he’s lost numerous business deals, and now Forbes says he’s no longer a billionaire. West’s antisemitic attacks have harmed the public discourse and put innocent people in danger. At the same time, West is destroying himself.
Then there’s Elon Musk, whose scandalous and bumbling attempt at taking over Twitter suddenly “succeeded” when Twitter’s leadership essentially walked off and allowed themselves to be fired. But make no mistake, Musk isn’t succeeding here. He made clear that he didn’t really want to buy Twitter – at least not at the asking price – and he only ended up going through with it in order to avoid testifying under oath in a scandal that the federal government is reportedly investigating him over.
So now Musk is stuck massively overpaying for Twitter, with a stunning percentage of his personal wealth now tied up in the deal, and a number of outside investors who are going to be breathing down his neck. Twitter has already lost at least one major advertiser, meaning Musk has to be on his best behavior for awhile in order to keep Twitter financially viable. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t appear capable of that.
Musk is already tweeting phony, disgusting, and disproven right wing conspiracy theories, and then deleting them hours later. He knows he can’t get away with tweeting this kind of garbage. Yet he appears to be so psychologically unwell, he actually believes the unhinged conspiracy theories he’s posting. If he’s so unwell that he thinks pizza gate level phony stories are real, it’s not clear that he’s capable of even temporarily mimicking sane behavior for the sake of saving himself from financial ruin.
Whereas Trump very visibly lost the Oval Office and is now visibly on the verge of criminal indictment, and Kanye West has very visibly lost his shoe deals and such, Musk is (for now) able to create the illusion that he somehow has us all right where he wants us. After all, he technically has control of Twitter. But the fact that he’s deleting his most harmful tweets means he knows he can’t get away with that kind of deranged behavior. Yet he’ll likely just end up tweeting new unhinged right wing conspiracy theories, because he can’t help himself. Twitter is now his prison. He’s stuck with it, can’t get rid of it, and the more he craps up the place the more he harms his own status and future. If Musk screws up Twitter badly enough, he could even theoretically lose control of his car company. The guy is that leveraged, on a deal that would be almost guaranteed to lose him money even if he weren’t actively sabotaging himself.
Because Donald Trump “got away” with his openly and cartoonishly deranged behavior for awhile thanks to the protections of the presidency, it seemingly convinced other wealthy jerks like Kanye West and Elon Musk that they could also get away with (or even benefit from) similarly cartoonishly deranged behavior. But at this point Trump is looking at spending the rest of his life in prison and has got to be wishing he’d never turned himself into a political villain to begin with. And now those who followed him down that rabbit hole are surely wishing they hadn’t.
