Elon Musk Totally Screwed Donald Trump
Musk reinstated Trump's Twitter account when he announced his 2024 run. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea?
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – Looks like Jack Smith managed to get his hands on Donald Trump’s Twitter account even though Elon Musk put up a hell of a fight to stop Smith from succeeding. We’ll get into the details presently, but before we do, let’s talk about Elon’s fascination with the one term loser ex-president and why his man-crush on Trump matters.
First, as a matter of style, I will not be referring to Twitter by its stupid new name. After spending the last 14 years posting nearly 117,000 tweets, and after losing my verified status, I refuse to call it by its new name because fuck you, Elon.
Nevertheless, for nearly a year, I’ve been theorizing that Elon’s takeover of Twitter was suspiciously timed to coincide with Trump’s latest campaign for president. It’s worth noting that Elon officially took control of Twitter on October 28, 2022. Trump announced his latest run for president two weeks later on November 15, 2022.
Convenient – for both of these a-holes.
I’m not suggesting there’s any coordination between Elon and Trump. It’s just that Elon loves chaos. After all, in our modern tech-billionaire-driven world, chaos is the new cocaine. The more chaos there is, the more we flock to social media to either bask in and amplify the chaos, or to seek out funny, mindless things to ease the stress of the chaos. Elon, as many of us have observed, isn’t just a chaos addict, he’s a full blown agent of chaos, manufacturing a lot of it himself. And the best proof of that mindset is his constant shaking of the ant farm – his erratic decision making at Twitter along with his incomprehensible and duplicitous worldview.
Elon practically begged Trump to start tweeting on the platform again after Elon un-suspended Trump’s account and the accounts of hundreds of Trump-supporting, insurrectionist trolls. He knows that Trump’s presence in the spotlight is good for business because the ex-president is chaos personified. Besides, Elon seems to think Trump is some kind of political martyr – a persecuted truth-teller who’s being silenced by the same hive-minded scolds who want to tax billionaires at 90 percent.
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Perhaps this is also why Elon implemented a new business model for Twitter Blue, promising significantly higher reach in exchange for whatever it costs now to subscribe to the service. In other words, anyone who pays Elon is buying increased visibility – more people will see the tweets of paying customers than non-paying customers.
This is one of the reasons why it was reported that, with the 2024 election around the corner, Russian propagandists are buying up Twitter Blue subscriptions. This way, these pro-Trump accounts will enjoy maximum visibility in time for the election, courtesy of chaos agent Elon Musk.
Indeed, Elon doesn’t even believe disinformation exists, while also amplifying it. Nevertheless, we can assume he knows what happened in 2016 when Trump was elected due to a wave of pro-Trump, anti-Hillary disinformation flooding the social media platforms including Twitter, so he’s set the table for a 2024 repeat of all that. Buckle up.
This is all to contextualize the story that dropped this week about how Jack Smith subpoenaed Elon’s Twitter in January for access to Trump’s account.
According to The New Republic, “the order barred the social media platform from informing Trump that his account would be searched.” We know the likely reason why this happened: Trump has already been caught red-handed trying to destroy subpoenaed evidence in the Mar-a-lago top secret document theft prosecution. Based on his all-caps whining on Truth Social, it appears as though Trump only learned about the subpoena this week, which is endlessly hilarious to me. His already galactic level of paranoia can’t even be charted at this stage of the game, and this subpoena news has to have exacerbated it. Good.
But there’s another twist.
It turns out Elon refused to comply with the subpoena and was fined $50,000 per day, totaling $350,000 before all was said and done. Yes, Elon refused to comply with the United States government in defense of Trump, yet Elon easily complied with the Turkish government when it demanded Elon block access to the platform for voters in advance of an election when the nation’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was on the ballot. In total, Elon has acquiesced to 83 percent of censorship requests by authoritarian governments, according to El Pais. Yet he put up an expensive fight when the U.S. government stopped by.
Yes, Elon is a free speech absolutist in defiance of the American government, but if you’re a foreign dictator, he’s more than happy to do whatever you want – most of the time.
I wonder if Jack Smith would have subpoenaed Trump’s Twitter account if it had remained deleted instead of it being reinstated seven days after Trump announced his 2024 campaign. I wonder if this subpoena might be Elon’s fault for calling attention to the account rather than leaving in the trash. I hope we find out. I’d love it if one of Trump’s biggest fanboys inadvertently gave Jack Smith vital evidence in the prosecution.
Oh, and one more thing: we’re not just talking about Trump’s tweets, by the way. If Jack Smith has the contents of Trump’s account, he probably has all of Trump’s direct messages, too.
Sleep tight, Biff.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:
Trump Has Destroyed The Republican Party
Trump destroyed the state parties in battleground states just in time for the most important election of his life.
by Justin Rosario
Inertia is the tendency for an object in motion to stay in motion. It’s a law of physics that, surprisingly, frequently applies to human behavior and institutions. What this means in practical terms is that even when something fundamental changes, whether for good or ill, there is often a lag time until we see the effect of those changes.
Another way of putting it is “a fish rots from the head down.” The Republican Party is the fish in question and it is starting to decompose. As bad as the stench is, what you are seeing (or smelling) is the slow and inevitable death of an organization consumed by the cancer of Trumpism.
The (college) party is over
Back in May, I wrote about Trumpism infecting college Young Republican clubs. Once upon a time, these clubs were incubators for baby Republicans who would grow up to hate all the right people and unquestioningly pursue the Republican agenda. They would assist state GOP parties with get out the vote efforts and pushing local policy. They, like college Democratic clubs, were part of the boring machinery that gets work done.
But that was then and this is now. Trump followers don’t have time for the boring drudge work needed to pass zoning laws to disadvantage Black families or push tax cuts that will slowly strangle homeless shelters while lining the pockets of real estate developers. That isn’t as exciting as getting on camera and openly endorsing political violence.
Why bother with local politics when being the loudest, most abrasive asshole possible will garner notoriety in a party that rewards loud abrasive assholes? Newt Gingrich really started the ball rolling on this with the Tea Party was the most obvious manifestation. At least until Trump made it the only real metric of success in the GOP. Now, being good at your job as a Republican is almost entirely defined by how awful you are as a human being.
The downside of this is that the Republican Party, already highly dysfunctional at the national level, is starting to break apart at every level. If you think the college level stuff is bad, wait until you see what’s happening to the state parties.
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1) As a big technology enthusiast, I used to be an Elon Musk fanboy. That stopped a long time ago, but I still can't believe how far to the right he has moved politically.
2) I would respectfully disagree with Justin about Gingrich being the start of the "assholiness" of the Republican leaders. I'd lay the blame at the feet of Rush Limbaugh, who through his show brainwashed millions into thinking that being a selfish, hateful prick was somehow a virtue. And, his use of the obnoxious, infuriating term "Feminazi" made my blood boil--my late mother was an actual Nazi refugee, and his terminology demeaned the fight for gender equality but at the same, it completely discounted how evil the actual Nazis were.
They are both LOSERS & CHEATS. Simple enough!