Why Elon Musk is not Steve Bannon

We're stuck with Elonald. But their odd alliance makes a perfect target.

In Duran and Lakoff’s Frame Lab, I have a piece about how to take on the bizarre situation of MAGA having two daddies. But I hate to disappoint you. I don’t think it’s possible to break up the broligarch bromance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk—at least for the foreseeable future.

Believe me. I understand why people of good faith think we could sever this most unholy and destructive alliance in American history. We remember fondly how a deluge of press attention in 2017 led to a temporarily acrimonious split between Trump and his then-closest advisor, Steve Bannon.

Even some people of bad faith—like Steve Bannon himself—seem to have this fantasy.

But this fond wish is just another of Steve’s delusions.

There’s no bro-vorce coming soon

Musk is the richest human ever to live. He has an unchecked desire to procreate, win at video games he doesn’t play, and dominate his perceived enemies. These lusts even dwarf Trump’s unquenchable neediness. However, Musk has the GDP of a small country, and his financial fate is so inextricable from the global economy that he could unapologetically perform two Sieg Heils while celebrating Trump’s inauguration and suffer zero consequences.

Bannon is a podcaster whose power comes almost entirely from his connection to Trump and his ability to personify the word “frumpy.”

But it’s not just about who these two are. It’s about what they can do for Donald Trump. Musk is willing to spend huge in ways that align almost perfectly with Trump’s interests. He is currently trying to take the nation's most critical state Supreme Court race for the GOP. (You can help fight back by supporting Susan Johnson for Justice.)

Both Trump and Musk are actively hostile to democracy. Both have weaponized antipathy toward efforts to achieve “racial equity” while expressing a completely unnecessary sympathy for the fascist German right and the Afrikaner class that dominated during Apartheid South Africa. Both despise paying taxes and flout the law in a cartoonish way that seemed about to collapse on them—until Trump won the presidency.

Now, Trump has all the power of “immunity” granted to him by the Republicans in the Supreme Court, and Musk has infiltrated the government and likely rooted out more than a dozen efforts to hold him accountable through reviews and investigations.

Their alliance has paid off massively for both. More importantly, they still need each other to avoid any consequences and to advance their increasingly fascist agendas together. In that way, their relationship is less like Trump’s with Bannon and far more like the current president of the United States’s alliance with Vladimir Putin.

Two bleak scenarios

There are two answers to why Trump has ceded so much power to Musk. Both point to the extreme danger that the American Republic faces now.

1. Elon is Donald’s puppetmaster.

   No one has done more than Elon Musk to make Donald Trump president again. The money he invested is just the start of what he did to drag the 45th president from a morass of societal sanctions, criminal charges, and legal bills into being the 47th president.
   
   When Musk bought Twitter, Trump was still banned from that app and Facebook. Trump ushered him back into his fullest digital form by giving Mark Zuckerberg an excuse also to reinstate the leader of the failed January 6th coup. His support made it comfortable for tech billionaires to stand behind or beside Trump, ending up with them literally sitting on stage with Trump. Musk’s once-sterling reputation in the press as a hybrid between Da Vinci, Edison, and Iron Man helped keep the political and media establishment on X through the election, where his warping of the site could thoroughly propagandize them. Musk’s purchase of Twitter also restored and exaggerated Trump’s power by creating a radicalization machine that fires up the threats that have silenced nearly all dissent in the Republican Party.

   
   Trump owes Musk in a way that no American president should be allowed to owe anyone. And just as he remade Trump, he could re-break him.
   
   In this scenario, Musk is the master puppeteer Republicans always pretend George Soros to be, leaving us to believe that these conspiracy theories were not just fueled by antisemitism but also burning jealousy.

2. Trump is happy to be king, while Elon is his CEO.
   This explanation will likely only make sense immediately if you follow the Nerd Reich newsletter from Framelab’s Gil Durán and his work in the New Republic.
   
   Durán has uncovered—in plain sight—a plot to assault the American government in hopes of establishing a tech takeover. This ongoing coup has been so successful that it has already achieved the “capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by neo-reactionaries.”

   
   The “thinking” behind this anti-democratic wet dream was primarily generated by a pseudo-philosopher named Curtis Yarvin, who is at least friendly with JD Vance and has inspired the increasingly apocalyptic worldview of Vance’s primary corporate sponsor, Peter Thiel.

   
   Yarvin is a professed monarchist who proposed helping America get over our “dictator phobia” with a CEO.

   
   “The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments,” Yarvin wrote. “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.”

   
   This view nods to strict-father morality in that it installs Trump as the head of this dictatorship. “Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be,” Yarvin wrote.
   

It’s weird, but it’s working

Among the hard-core MAGA elite and fans of Republican media, Elon is a massive star. They see his efforts as realizing a generations-long ambition to gut the government and love the fuckery of seeing it happening in the guise of “audit.”

That doesn’t change the undeniable creepiness of the partnership, which is at odds with the fundamentals of the way America has governed itself and with the way Republican brains function.

Musk is younger than Trump and occasionally shows deference to Trump in a way that suggests he sees Trump as an equal or something like a father. If you’ve ever seen a video of Errol Musk—Elon’s father, who has issues with fatherhood himself—you might note that he sounds like an AI mashup of Donald Trump and his famous son.

Only Freud would attempt to unpack what’s going on here. But all of this suggests a rupture between the two men is not likely, and it’s not necessary. Democrats can and should fight against the theft and betrayal of our country being engineered by these two men. They can do this by exploiting this odd couple's novelty and nefariousness.

This American nightmare

Regardless of the true nature of Trump's relationship with Musk, their relationship is a nightmare for self-rule and antithetical to the American experiment. A billionaire bought the presidency and the president. That billionaire is now either bossing around the president or acting as a “dictator-like” CEO of America.

All of this stinks of what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalty.” The billionaires who run our country have usurped our constitutional order. Several interlocking crises have helped to give America’s filthiest rich power that would have made King George III drool.

In this emergency, we can’t fix Citizens United, media consolidation, and the hollowing out of journalism by the internet fast enough to save our democracy. However, we know that billionaires controlling the government bothers the majority of both parties and independents, according to a new poll by Data for Progress. Regardless of who the top man in this arrangement is, we should focus on the real issue and what made Trump possible—billionaire domination of our politics.

Billionaires shouldn’t be running our country or our president. In fact, running billionaires out of our politics seems to be an issue that could attract support across the political spectrum—though, admittedly, never from the well-monied interests that generally fund successful political efforts.

A perfect target

The oddness of this corrupt connection between Trump and Musk is a perfect target.

Taking down Tesla is a great start. Elon and his billionaire buddies must be made the faces of the giant tax cut for the rich Trump is trying to finance with horrific cuts to Medicaid. And Trump must always be exposed for what he is, a tool of the billionaires to undermine everything that makes democracy—and thus worker power—possible.

We can’t hope to tear Elonald apart. But it can help us hang together as we wage this long fight. Because as Benjamin Franklin might remind us, the other alternative ain’t great.