Musk, of course, is a typical Californian ideology tech libertarian industrialist who has now hitched his course to anti-woke culture war baiting and social media free speech pearl-clutching.

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.

Bush comes from a dynasty of establishment bureaucrats, is a neocon, neoliberal and started a war under the false pretense of the presence of WMD in Iraq.

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.

Trump, like Bush, made a lot of insane comments and deliberately cultivates a public persona that is designed to alternatively relate to (and be found endearing) his supporters, while simultaneously completely infuriating his detractors.

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.

I was politically conscious for his presidency (and a few more before it), and you make a good point or two, but I’d take issue with this characterization of the Bush years. His presidency was dynastic. He was a member of the political establishment, and a governor of Texas. He campaigned as a compassionate conservative, “a uniter, not a divider”. He (clumsily) spoke Spanish. “Global sourcing” accelerated during his presidency and he was a proponent of free trade. He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch. His administration was made up of radical Nixon-era neocons with a handful of moderates who lent it credibility (Rice and Powell particularly). 9/11 of course radically altered history and enabled their worst excesses. A costly illegitimate war, naked cronyism, and a massive curtailing of civil liberties that remains to this day. Without a doubt the most destructive presidency I’ve witnessed.

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.

> He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch.

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...

I’d describe Trump and Musk as similarly adapted to the attention economy. But it is a similarity of style, as you said, and not necessarily politics.

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.

> 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.

The degree to which this has occurred, across a wide range of issues, is still stunning to me.

Not really. The Bush administration accelerated the polarization of post-Cold War American public culture, which the Obama presidency failed to truly heal. It’s hard to be stunned when everything is progressing (or rather regressing) into tribalism and atomization as it has been for decades, just louder and more obnoxiously.

> which the Obama presidency failed to truly heal

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.

For all of its faults, I do not believe the Obama administration came up with the Tea Party Movement or Birtherism.

Not everything is politically motivated.