Also, is it JUST me or is it HEIGHT of stupidity to create a whole ass government department in order to cut whole ass government departments? They are literally creating more bureaucracy to “destroy bureaucracy”… granted, it’s stupid bureaucracy led by stupid men, but still… God, we are in the very wrongest trouser leg of time…
Definitely misses the forests for the trees. Guns and climate change are economic populist topics. Climate change destroys wealth, primarily for the 99%. Gun violence, likewise, destroys families, causes widespread economic harm, and pulls school resources away from education into otherwise useless time and energy.
If people want to be part of economic populism, they need to be open to listening to experts, otherwise it’s empty pageantry
He’s theoretically supposed to be running SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, the Musk Foundation, the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and who the hell knows what else in addition to co-raising his twelve children. Yet he apparently spends enough time playing video games to be one of the top 20 Diablo players in the world.
I assume he will take his new government position just as seriously as he takes his other responsibilities. Which is to say he’ll probably put in a token effort yet still find some incredibly stupid ways to screw it up.
I think it’s safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement – including antitrust – based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:
[…]
Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America’s big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They’re all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.
[…]
Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won’t target them because they’re crooked: he’ll target them because they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.