“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.
Paul Krugman wrote recently that Elon Musk has “gone full MAGA.” The press will tell you what they can get away with. And right-thinking readers will uncritically accept it, for the most part. Trump was good for news traffic. My guess is that Musk is similarly good for business, judging on how many journalists seem to be on the Elon beat. I expect to read and hear a lot more of this for as long as that remains true.
But there is something to be said about a Trumpian style to public behavior. Maybe it’s just social media demagoguery. Tactical trolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkvvAQxxo_0
Musk, like other celebrity public figures on social media who make a lot of vapid grandiose statements and then flame out when challenged, are simply operating in the same style.
It’s funny you mentioned Bush, because growing up during his presidency, when terms like “reality-based community” and “truthiness” were coined, I never felt that Trump was a radically new phenomenon. He was Bush except louder - with less subtext.
Trump is isolationist (but didn't push through his policies), didn't start a war and would probably have prevented the Ukraine war had he still been president. Yes, without further loss of territories!
There are no similarities at all. But no-more-mean-tweets is all that matters for the $250,000 per year SV chickenhawks. Others will go to war for them.
You may not have been around for his presidency, which is why you’re choosing to focus on substantiative policy choices rather than the public style I am talking about, but Bush was well criticized for appearing to be a brash and foolishly pugnacious figure. Not all that different from Trump, except Bush’s ranch owner shtick made him more rural coded- a cowboy. Both also liked to lambaste so-called experts and make use of anti-intellectual sentiment. They are more stylistically similar to each other than to say, Romney, McCain, Jeb Bush, or even Ted Cruz.
He was not at all pugnacious, although, like Trump, the outrage he inspired was partly due to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication. He put his foot in his mouth. He was a national embarrassment. But his image was that of a born-again Christian, with an upright moral posture. Quite a distance from the verbal pugilist who made ridiculous threats to celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell.
The Democratic opposition saw his election as illegitimate—the Pat Buchanan vote, hanging chad Florida controversy. Worth remembering. Not the first and certainly not the last disputed election.
I'd argue that it went further than that. Perhaps this was ginned up by his liberal critics, who loved to muckrake up shocking exposés like Jesus Camp and make clumsy analogies between Evangelicalism and the Taliban, but Bush's bluff, often stumbling, manner and tendency to engage in dismissing "those in the know" also encapsulated an anti-intellectualism that was intended to appeal to anti-elite, and thus populist, image.
Hell, his anti-intellectualism was written about in December 2000 [0], before his presidency had even begun! The fact that he was seen as somewhat of a dunderhead also fed into that. Despite being a dynastic scion and cabal of advisors, he also posed as a political outsider as well [1]. Perhaps in some ways, Bush's attempts to portray himself as diametrically opposite of what he was, thereby using the Big Lie technique, is something that he and Trump stylistically have in common, and is something that made libs mad in both eras.
> He was not at all pugnacious
While he might not have personally attacked critics as later presidents might have- calling anti-war critics treasonous in a more roundabout, conventional-politician way than directly- he was certainly seen as a bellicose warmonger to critics, especially by foreign observers. Though sure, perhaps this is a case where policy overshadowed personal style.
But no, I'm sure he was seen as a pugnacious to some degree, even if it was only in a ridiculous, chickenhawk, "lemme at him, chief" sort of way.
> to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication.
As per above, burnished his populist image to a segment of the electorate. Certainly in contrast to Kerry.
[0] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-renaissance-of-anti-in...
[1]https://www.quora.com/Why-was-George-W-Bush-seen-as-an-outsi...
While Bush II was far from the inventor of executive dissimulation, his administration did have a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with the truth. But truthiness was coined by Colbert, a brilliant critic of that administration, to describe things that aren’t true but feel true. It’s regrettable, but increasingly over the last five or six years, that term could be applied with similar frequency to claims made on either side of the aisle.
The degree to which this has occurred, across a wide range of issues, is still stunning to me.
Hard to succeed at solving a problem when your actions seem almost perfectly tailored to exacerbate it.
I'm not going to relitigate the Obama era. Democrats seem incapable of understanding that the "clinging to guns, religion" comment, and the policies that follow from such a stance, were divisive.
Does it suck that we have such clearly delineated tribes? Yes. But Musk is also smart enough to realize that that's the case, and he's knowingly chosen to repeat and engage with the shibboleths of the extreme right.
When Musk is tweeting “kek”, unbanning insurrectionists, banning left leaning journalists (not even far left!), then it’s clear that he’s not actually about balance. He’s signaling he is part of a particular tribe whose chief is Donald Trump, not that he’s a centrist.
I'm sorry, what? This claim is laughable. Musk claims he hasn't ever voted for him, and they have publicly fueded frequently.
You can argue his politics have moved right. You can't credibly argue he's a Trump supporter.
I guess to some people these two things are equivalent, but it's simply incorrect, and reveals a certain political naivete in those making such claims.