The Trump-Musk alliance is about their unquenchable thirst for power

Also their hatred of women, trans people, and immigrants. But it has nothing to do with "wasteful spending," no matter what the New York Times tells you.

Here’s how the New York Times just explained the ever-closer alliance between Nazi-adjacent insurrectionist Donald Trump and Nazi-adjacent Twitter-ruiner Elon Musk, who has committed to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Trump return to the White House:

In a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Trump said he planned to appoint Mr. Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX and X, as the head of a new government efficiency commission if he was elected president in November.

The commission would audit the “entire federal government” and “make recommendations for drastic reforms,” Mr. Trump said.

The announcement capped weeks of discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, who have bonded over a mutual hobbyhorse of eliminating wasteful spending, three people close to the men said. Mr. Trump has told Mr. Musk that he wants the tech entrepreneur to slash the federal government’s costs, just as he did at his social media company X, one of the people said.

This is nonsense!

This is nonsense because neither man actually gives a damn about “government efficiency” or “wasteful spending,” and this is nonsense because they actually do have other shared interests: Accruing as much money and power as possible for themselves and a small cohort of their loyalists, and inflicting as much pain as possible on the large number of Americans they hate, particularly (but definitely not limited to!) women, trans people, immigrants, and basically everyone to the left of Dick Cheney.

Let’s get the “government efficiency” and “wasteful spending” part out of the way first. And let’s first consider Trump. When we do so, it is useful to keep in mind that Donald Trump has already been president of the United States. This is a very recent historical fact that somehow tends to go missing from news reports about his various assertions and promises about how he would govern, but it can lend a useful insight into their sincerity.

As president, Donald Trump was responsible for a massive increase in government debt because he coupled a huge tax cut for the wealthy with … no notable spending cuts. ProPublica explained in 2021:

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. […]

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”

The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar.

Before anyone says “yeah but Trump totally would have cut gobs of wasteful spending if it wasn’t for the socialist Democrats in Congress” I will remind you that for two of Trump’s four years as president Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, with (supposed) deficit hawks Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell serving as Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader. They didn’t make meaningful cuts to “wasteful spending” or improve “government efficiency” because they do not actually give a damn about these things. What they actually want to do is cut social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare and school lunches. “Wasteful spending” and “government efficiency” are just codes; they don’t actually care if the Department of Housing and Urban Development could save a few bucks by buying ballpoint pens in bulk.

Another way we know Donald Trump doesn’t actually care about wasteful government spending is that he spent four years as president using the federal government to enrich himself and his family, including by gouging the Secret Service for exorbitant rates at Trump businesses:

The Trump Organization appears to have overcharged the Secret Service for stays at Trump-owned properties by agents protecting the then-president. The charges exceeded the government’s approved rate, according to the House Oversight Committee, which says Secret Service records show payments totaling over $1.4 million. […]

According to the documents, the Secret Service was charged as much as $1,185 per room per night, nearly five times the government rate, which is set by the General Services Administration.

This is a far cry from what Trump Organization Executive Vice President Eric Trump claimed in 2020 — that rooms were provided “at cost” to the Secret Service.

Someone who has truly made a “hobbyhorse of eliminating wasteful spending,” as the New York Times says of Donald Trump, probably wouldn’t stick taxpayers with this bill:

For example, in March, 2017, the Trump Organization charged agents who were providing security for Eric Trump a nightly rate of $1,160 per room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The letter cites other instances where Eric Trump or his wife, Lara, stayed at that hotel, including “five stays with rates at approximately triple the government rate.”

Then there’s the (at least) half-billion dollars taxpayers had to spend to cover costs stemming from Donald Trump’s deadly temper tantrum over losing the 2020 election. Not to mention the sham government commission Trump set up in 2017 to advance his lie that he lost the 2016 popular vote due to (non-existent) voter fraud.

Another way we know Donald Trump doesn’t actually care about wasteful spending is that flamboyantly wasteful spending is his whole brand, or at least it was before seething hatred of women and people of color became his whole brand. But we’ll come back to that.

Elon Musk? Elon Musk is, most days, the richest person in the world, thanks in large part to government assistance. Elon Musk is also widely seen as increasingly cozy with Russia, which it turns out still rather dislikes America and its allies. If you were to rank-order government spending by wastefulness, somewhere pretty close to the top of the list would probably be “lucrative national-security-related government contracts for a company owned by the richest person in the world, whose sympathies often seem to be with America’s most belligerent foreign adversaries.” And not just wasteful — dangerously wasteful! But I am pretty sure Elon Musk does not want the government to cancel all those contracts with his space company.

The Times pointed to Musk cutting Twitter’s workforce as evidence of Musk’s disdain for “wasteful” spending:

Mr. Musk has also posted about spending cuts. He has expressed concerns over what he views as wasteful costs at his businesses, including at [Twitter], where he slashed more than 75 percent of the work force in 2022 and 2023. [Twitter’s] market valuation has dropped more than 55 percent since Mr. Musk bought the company in 2022, as advertisers have shied from the platform.

Though the Times notes that Twitter’s valuation has plummeted under Musk’s ownership, it doesn’t spell out the simple truth that Musk’s cost-cutting at the company is not an example of his dislike for wasteful spending, it’s an example of Musk dressing his ideological agenda up as something else. He didn’t lay off all those trust and safety and content moderation staff because he is allergic to wasteful spending, he did it because he wanted to turn Twitter into a playground for Nazis and misogynists — and he did so, helping crater the company’s value in the process. I’m no business genius but it seems pretty clear that spending cuts that contribute to advertisers fleeing your platform in horror and an 84 percent decrease in revenue are no way to improve “efficiency.”

So the story the New York Times tells readers about Trump and Musk “have bonded over a mutual hobbyhorse of eliminating wasteful spending”¹ is nonsense. What really draws them together?

First and most obviously: They’re both narcissists with an unquenchable thirst for accumulating as much wealth and power and control for themselves as possible, and each sees the other as a vehicle for doing so. But that’s not all! They also both hate the same people: Women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community with a particular emphasis on transgender people, and basically everyone to the left of Dick Cheney.²

Musk spends much of his time tweeting angrily about transgender people and spreading some of the most noxious and dehumanizing lies imaginable, an obsession clearly driven in part by his anger over his own transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, who he recently described as “dead — killed by the woke mind virus.” Wilson responded:

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.

“He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.

As Parker Molloy has explained, Musk’s attacks on transgender people are not just cruel and false, they are part of a right-wing political project:

Musk's high-profile statements come at a time when several U.S. states and entire countries are pushing to criminalize gender-affirming treatments for minors, and some political commentators are suggesting that adopting anti-transgender stances could be electorally advantageous. Yet these positions fly in the face of established medical consensus and the lived experiences of transgender individuals like Wilson.

That brings us to Trump, who is also ramping up his false attacks on transgender people, and using them in attempt to undermine public schools and scare voters. At a “Moms for Liberty” event last month, Trump lied: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

It probably could go without saying that this is simply not happening, but it’s important to say it anyway: Zero schools are imposing operations on children. It is pure bullshit; a sick lie by a sick man intent on stoking fear about transgender people — fear that will inevitably lead to discrimination and violence — and destroying public education.

And yes, it’s a deliberate lie, not just a verbal slip-up from an increasingly incoherent and confused man. We know this because a week later Trump did it again:

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump told the crowd in Mosinee, Wisconsin.

The New York Times has made only passing mention of these lies, the first coming nearly a week after the Moms for Liberty event. Not because the Times was unaware of the event — it ran a lengthy piece all about the event that downplayed an incident in which a Moms for Liberty chapter quoted Adolf Hitler. The paper just didn’t find Donald Trump making up an obscene lie about schools imposing gender conversation surgeries on children noteworthy. And that article about the Trump-Musk alliance? It doesn’t mention their shared hostility towards transgender people; not a single word. (It should be noted that the New York Times itself has faced significant criticism for coverage widely seen as dangerously biased against transgender people, which might help explain the paper’s lack of interest in Trumps lies.)

What else do Trump and Musk have in common? Both have supported and enjoyed the support of Nazis and the Nazi-adjacent. Both constantly spread racist lies about immigrants. Both are deeply misogynist and have an obvious contempt for democracy.

Trump and Musk say their alliance is about cutting wasteful spending and improving government efficiency for the simple reason that outside of James Bond movies people rarely explicitly declare their intention to amass unchecked power and wealth and use it to smite their enemies.³ It’s a cover story, and not a very good one. The New York Times can pretend to believe that, but we don’t have to.

1. The Times attributed this sentiment to “three people close to the men,” but this doesn’t get the paper off the hook. The New York Times chose to frame the entire article around this obvious nonsense. It adopted the characterization even if it didn’t originate it. The paper could just as easily and more accurately chosen to quote and paraphrase people who correctly note that neither man’s expressed concerns about wasteful spending are consistent with their own behavior, and that their alliance is quite clearly driven by far less noble interests. It did not. Instead, it devoted 13 paragraphs to portraying one or both of them as a foe of wasteful spending.

2. Former Vice President Cheney, by the way, endorsed Kamala Harris two days ago — an endorsement pretty much unprecedented in modern American political history. The New York Times hasn’t bothered to run an article about this extraordinary development in its print edition, though it gave front-page treatment to anti-vaxxer RFK, Jr.’s recent endorsement of Trump.

3. Though because Trump and Musk both have the discipline of a newborn puppy, they both come extremely close to saying just that on a regular basis.