Poor pathetic Elon. They're reduced to hawking his tanking product. Sad!
Giving them away? LOL. Or maybe the "details" include giving money to Trump.
UPDATE 03/13/2025:
Trump never was very good at seeing past the present moment. He functions on a reptile brain, reacting to stimuli and seeking only personal gratification.President Donald Trump absolutely despises green energy. He regularly boasts that he is killing the “green new scam,” which means he’s terminating as many of his predecessor’s investments in renewable energy as he can. That could have an immensely detrimental impact, leading to far fewer electric vehicles on our roads—and far fewer factory jobs constructing them.
But after careful deliberation about what truly serves the national interest, Trump has now made one considered exception to his dislike of green technologies.
[...]
This bizarre eruption is worth dwelling on, because it opens a window on the perils of what political theorists describe as our national descent into “clientelist” rule. It attempts to reduce the federal government’s actions and functions to instruments for rewarding friends and punishing enemies.
[...]
Trump is moving to roll back federal subsidies for electric vehicles, attempting to cripple plans to build charging stations nationwide, and reversing tailpipe pollution regulations meant to encourage the E.V. transition.
According to a new Repeat Project study, all this could cause E.V. sales to drop by 40 percent in 2030, relative to Biden’s policies.
[...]
Now Trump is using the power of the presidential bully pulpit to encourage people to buy electric vehicles that happen to be the leading product of his top billionaire crony and campaign benefactor—as a display of loyalty to both of them. This jarring contrast—E.V.s are bad, and the federal government must not incentivize them; but buy Teslas because Trump’s top ally deserves gratitude and devotion—shows that there’s no discernible conception of the national interest animating any of this.
[...]
Why does Trump care about Tesla’s sales, anyway? Most crudely, Trump doesn’t like it when charts and metrics reflecting on his presidency go in the wrong direction. Right now, Trump is contending with charts showing the markets tanking over his tariffs, charts showing his net approval sliding, and now, charts showing Tesla’s stock plummeting. Charts going down look weak. Charts going up look strong.
[...]
Trump notoriously does not believe polls. But one metric he pays attention to is business success. The president knows his fortunes are now inextricably entangled with whatever Musk authors, and the stories about Tesla sales tanking are a metric of Musk’s failings that are clearly cutting deep with Trump. As his angry midnight rant displays, he knows that metric is very much going in the wrong direction.
[...]
[Trump is] instituting a system based on favoritism and graft, while openly sabotaging procedures designed to safeguard neutrality in public service. Trump’s undisguised vow to shape energy and tax policy to benefit wealthy donors, his firing of inspectors general who are insufficiently dutiful to him, his mass purges of civil servants to give way to loyalists, his selection of top law enforcement officials who openly promise to target his enemies—all these reflect this change [from a depersonalized beaurocracy to a clientelist government].
[...]
Musk’s ascension represents a striking twist to all this. Trump has delegated him extraordinary power over the government, yet he is almost entirely unfettered from mechanisms of basic accountability. [...] [T]he government is now shaped around the personal interests and whims of not one man but two.
What Trump has discovered is that his own public standing is yoked to Musk’s. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has observed that in empowering Musk, Trump is putting his presidency in the hands of a figure “who is accountable to no one but himself,” and if the consequences of his DOGE cuts strike, “Musk can walk away,” leaving the mess with Trump and the GOP.
New Republic
No comments:
Post a Comment