On Wednesday, president-elect Donald Trump decided he’d let Twitter CEO Elon Musk know that he’s growing tired of his company, humiliating him in front of House Republicans during a conference.
Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC noted that Trump has a “twisted psyche” and has to “humiliate everyone around him to demonstrate his dominance over them.”
Trump told the GOP lawmakers, “Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him.”
“Everyone laughed,” O’Donnell noted. “They laughed that uncomfortable laugh. But they laugh when Donald Trump makes a joke about someone on his team, a joke that everyone knows is true, a joke that paints that person as pathetic, as Donald Trump’s personal sense of superiority demands that he do.”
Earlier this week, Trump announced that Musk would be the co-head of a new agency tasked with cutting bureaucratic waste in government.
That too is a slap in the face to Musk, O’Donnell added, because it’s a “fake” job with no actual power.
In other words, O’Donnell concluded, Trump is now officially “Elon’s daddy.”
According to some in the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s unexpected win last week and the gains made by the GOP suggest that a “political realignment” is underway in the country that will make their party a permanent majority.
However, according to political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, the coalition Trump assembled for his win is incredibly fragile and may not last long.
Writing in the New York Times, Judis and Teixeira warn that Trump’s new GOP has a “great potential for a crackup.”
“He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos. Or take tariffs… Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.”
Additionally, they write, there’s the fact that Trump is an incredibly self-destructive and unstable person, which doesn’t exactly bode well when you’re trying to lead people.
“The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.”
“Trump’s dream of a historic Republican realignment may not survive his second term,” they conclude, and it’s hard to argue against such a prediction. After all, we’ve all seen how the twice-impeached president-elect causes chaos everywhere he goes.
Here’s a personal prediction: Within six months, the U.S. economy will be in a deep recession, Trump will be mired in personal scandal, and the GOP will be looking for a way to excuse his actions.
Within 24 hours of Donald Trump being named winner of the 2024 presidential election, headlines began circulating that suggested he’d done so by a “landslide.”
But the truth is that the election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will be decided by about 1 percentage point, which is nowhere near landslide proportions.
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell expertly laid out the case against a landslide on his show Monday evening, noting:
“Ballots received in the mail tomorrow will be counted in California. So there are literally millions of ballots yet to be counted in this country, including in the state of Pennsylvania, where thousands of votes remain to be counted to determine the balance of the United States Senate.”
“Republicans will probably have 52 senators next year or 53 if Republicans win the Pennsylvania Senate election. The Democrats will probably have 47 members of the Senate or 48 if Democrat Bob Casey wins the Pennsylvania Senate race.”
The GOP will also have a narrow margin of control in the House.
“We still don’t know which party will control the House of Representatives, but we do know that it will be very close. As of tonight, Republicans have 214 seats in the House and Democrats have 205 seats in the House, according to NBC News, with 16 remaining to be decided.”
And then there’s the Trump-Harris margin of victory, which is getting smaller by the second as more ballots are tabulated.
“In the presidential vote. Donald Trump currently has 50.2% of the vote to Kamala Harris, 48.1% of the vote. But that margin will probably narrow after all the California votes are finally counted, and it is possible that Kamala Harris will end up with only one– 1% of the vote less than Donald Trump, a 1% gap. Right now, she’s at 2% less than Donald Trump.”
“If you hear anyone calling this election a landslide, please stop listening to that person! About elections, at least.”
What qualifies as a landslide? Well, when Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 by a whopping 9%, even that wasn’t considered to be a landslide.
O’Donnell concluded his summary with this historical reminder of what a landslide looks like:
“The last landslide we had was Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, where he won 49 states in the Electoral College, with only the state of Minnesota voting for Walter Mondale, who was from Minnesota. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18 points. That’s what a landslide looks like.”
Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite American puppet, Donald Trump, is once again about to occupy the Oval Office and control U.S. foreign policy, it appears that the nation of Ukraine will soon be sacrificed to the Russians and forced to sign a peace agreement that will allow Putin to keep major portions of another sovereign country, which is in direct violation of numerous international agreements.
Will Donald Trump sell out our Ukrainian allies and allow Putin to keep his ill-gotten gains? Based on a social media posting from the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., it certainly seems so.
Don Jr. shared a video on Instagram of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy next to the disgraced president-elect along with a message:
“POV: You’re 38 Days from losing your allowance.”
Disgusting. Don Jr. posted this anti-Ukraine video on Instagram saying that President Zelensky will “lose his allowance” when his father takes office
Don Jr is vile! And it's so trashy that Trump's son is on X posting all manner of political garbage. Imagine if Obama's daughters were doing that or Chelsea Clinton or Hunter Biden. Again, these Trumps can do whatever the hell they want. It's sick and toxic.
Donald Trump Jr. has never earned a living and lives off the lavish allowances from his father.
The scariest thought he can conceive is losing his allowance, thus that is his ultimate insult, to tell Zelenskyy that now he will lose his allowance 🤡🤡🤡
It's no secret that Trump and his entire inner circle (and the MAGA movement as a whole) are firmly pro-Russia, but this is still so callous and tasteless.
So we give Ukraine to Russia. I guess that dumfuk never played Risk as a child.
The objective in the game of Risk is to dominate the world by controlling every territory on the game board. Players aim to do this by using strategic military tactics to attack and defend…
Even though he donated untold millions of dollars to get Donald Trump elected for the second time, Twitter CEO Elon Musk is about to be unceremoniously thrown overboard by the incoming president, according to a historian, because Trump is not about to share the spotlight with anyone. His massive ego won’t him.
In an article published by the New York Times, David Nasaw predicts Musk’s shelflife as an influencer to the Trump administration will be brief.
“Mr. Trump may be mercurial, but in this situation he is highly unlikely to break historical precedent,” Nassaw notes. “I predict that you will probably join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose.”
Another reason for Musk’s fading influence is that his promise of cutting trillions from the federal budget would cause an economic meltdown and likely throw the United States into a second Great Depression. That would be political suicide for Trump and the GOP.
“I’m not sure what you were thinking — or if you were thinking — when you clambered on that Madison Square Garden stage and claimed that as chief of the Department of Government Efficiency… you would cut at least $2 trillion of government spending,” Nasaw writes. “The results of such a gutting would, even conservative think-tank analysts predicted, be catastrophic. It is nearly impossible to imagine a majority of Republican lawmakers endorsing your plans to slash a third of all federal spending. To do so would be political suicide.”
So what exactly does Musk get out of his alliance with Trump? More money, of course, as Nasaw predicts his investments — especially Twitter/X — will increase in value, adding to his already massive fortune.
