Would love to be the fly in the "ketchup on the White House wall" during Donald Trump's Elon Musk tantrum

Commentary | Ya' Think❓ Bromance: Bruised Musk brand is his (horrible❗) DOGE legacy

Opinion by Maureen Dowd published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel news: 

"Oh but it's sad when a love affair dies
But we have pretended enough
It's best that we both stop fooling ourselves", Evita.

Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.

Shrinking government is hard, particularly when you do it callously and carelessly — and apparently on hallucinogens.

As with Donald Trump’s tax tariffs, the Department of Government Efficiency has created more volatility than value.

A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, “Trump Cuts Social Security.”

He just wanted to get revenge on “the bureaucracy” by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression that they were cutting all the waste.

It is sickening that the Justice Department is considering settling a wrongful-death lawsuit by giving $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot on January 6, 2021, by a Capitol police officer, when she ignored his warnings and tried to climb through a smashed window into the Speaker’s Lobby in the Capitol.

If Babbitt was trying to help Trump claw back a “stolen” election by breaking into the Capitol, then breaking into the Capitol must be a good thing to do, and any police officer who tried to stop her and protect lawmakers cowering under desks must be in the wrong.

To abet Trump’s fake reality, the craven House Republicans refused to put up a plaque honoring the police officers and others who defended the Capitol that awful day.

I take it personally because my dad spent 20 years as a police inspector in Washington in charge of Senate security. He would run to the House whenever there was trouble. So if on Jan. 6 Mike Dowd had been preventing insurrectionists from assaulting lawmakers, he would now be, in Trump’s eyes, not a hero deserving of a plaque, but a blackguard who was thwarting “patriots,” as Trump calls the rioters he pardoned.

It is a disturbing bizarro world.  Trump was rewriting reality again Friday afternoon as one of the most flamboyant, destructive bromances in government history petered out in the Oval Office.

It had peaked last winter when Musk posted on social platform X, “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” and again when Trump tried to reciprocate by hawking Teslas in the White House driveway. Nevertleless, even these grand master salesmen couldn’t sell the spin that Elon had “delivered a colossal change.”

Musk has acknowledged recently that his dream of cutting $1 trillion had been a fantasy. He said changing Washington was “an uphill battle” and complained that Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which could add over $3 trillion in debt, undercut his DOGE attempts to save money.

As Trump said, Musk got a lot of “the slings and the arrows.” His approval rating cratered and violence has been directed toward Tesla, a brand once loved by liberals and in China, which is now tarnished.

Musk cut off a reporter who tried to ask about a Times article asserting that he was a habitual user of ketamine and a dabbler in ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms even after Trump had given him enormous control over the government.

That could explain the chain saw-wielding, the jumping up and down onstage, the manic baby-making and crusading for more spreading of sperm by smart people and the ominous Nazi-style salutes.

When a reporter asked Musk why he had a black eye, he joked about the viral video of Brigitte Macron shoving her husband’s face. Then he explained that while “horsing around” with his 5-year-old, X, he suggested the child punch him in the face, “and he did.”

The president and the Tony Stark prototype tried to convey the idea that they would remain tight, even though Musk would no longer be getting into angry altercations with Scott Bessent outside the Oval, sleeping on the floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and hanging around Mar-a-Lago. (Trump wants the $100 million Musk has pledged for his political operation.)

Musk, wearing a black “DOGE” cap and black “Dogefather” T-shirt, looked around the Oval, which Trump has tarted up to look like a Vegas gift shop and gushed that it “finally has the majesty that it deserves, thanks to the president.”

Trump gave Musk a golden ceremonial White House key, the kind of thing small-town mayors give out, and proclaimed: “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.” Trump said that the father of (at least) 14 would never desert DOGE completely because “It’s his baby.”

Musk brought the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things” to Washington.

But the main thing he broke was his own reputation.

Maureen Dowd is a New York Times columnist.

Oh! But it's sad when a love affair dies

Great break up songs for Donal.d Trump and Steve Bannon

By Jules Witcover

Oh but it's sad when a love affair dies
But we have pretended enough
It's best that we both stop fooling ourselves ~ Andrew Lloyd Webber

The dramatic breakup between Donald Trump and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has blown wide open the political direction of the Trump presidency at a particularly inopportune time.

"The love affair dies", comes just as Trump is frantically seeking to stabilize a presidency besieged by internal chaos and to cope with his own Justice Department's investigation into his campaign's possible collusion with Russian agents meddling in the 2016 election.

The president already has his hands full trying to discredit that probe and by association Special Counsel Robert Mueller, even as Trump insists he has no intention of firing him. 

Trump has now, also, turned against Mr. Bannon, his onetime guru.

The catalyst for this bizarre bombshell is a recently released insider book on Trump and his administration by free-lance writer Michael Wolff. 

In it, Bannon is said to have described Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russian officials at Trump Tower in 2016 as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" — among other explosive contentions.

In reply to derogatory remarks made by Bannon, about Trump family members, the president contended that Bannon's role in his campaign and first months of his administration were overblown. 

Of his old close adviser he tweeted, "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he has lost his mind." Mr. Bannon, he said, had "very little to do with our historic victory." 

But, Trump also instructed his lawyers to send Messrs. Bannon and Wolff cease-and-desist letters, citing an alleged breach of a nondisclosure agreement that Bannon has supposedly signed.

It's clear now that Bannon has become another cross for the president to bear among an accumulating list of critics in and out of his Republican Party. 

After being fired by Trump, Mr. Bannon returned to his old job running the alt-right Breitbart (aka "barfcart) News website, which formerly was a conspicuous Trump cheefleader. He stepped down from the company Tuesday, under pressure. 

Under Bannon, the (barfcart) Breitbart, became a vehicle for his own political ambitions, including clashes with the Republican Party establishment and national committee, which he appeared to be targeting for a takeover.

Beyond revealing the breakup itself, Mr. Wolff's book provides a stinging insight into what some White House insiders thought of the president. One fired campaign aide, Sam Nunberg, is quoted as saying he was assigned to tutor Mr. Trump on the Constitution. "I got as far as the Fourth Amendment," he said, "before ... his eyes are rolling back in his head." Mr. Bannon himself is said to have commented that Mr. Trump's daughter Ivanka was "dumb as a brick."

Also, a former deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, is quoted as saying that trying to deal with the president was "like trying to figure out what a child wants" — an observation she later denied having made.

Mr. Wolff also reports Ms. Walsh says she was obliged to respond to three different Trump power centers: Reince Priebus, the first chief of staff; Mr. Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

"For Walsh," Mr. Wolff writes, "it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one of another of them."

It was no wonder the Trump White House came off from the outside as a confused madhouse, with a president constantly getting mixed messages and making decisions as an ill-informed neophyte would-be politician.

Whether all the disclosures Mr. Wolff has reported are accurate or not, taken together they constitute more tasty morsels for both the conventional news media and the social media platforms Mr. Trump himself so favors.

As a new year gets started, there are already more than enough reasons to worry about the state of the union in the era of Donald J. Trump and his merry band of confusion-spinners.

(In fact, the Trump and Bannon love affair has died.)

Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.