“Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room” — Winston Churchill (attributed)
The cover of Time magazine's Feb 25, 2025, issue pictures a native South African sitting behind the US President’s Resolute Desk nursing a convenience store coffee. The message is clear. Trump may have the title, but Elon Musk wields the power. Is it true? Time (pun intended) will tell. In the interim, Democrats should use the meme that Trump is another man’s puppet to their advantage.
If Democrats want Musk’s total war against the federal government to hit a wall, they should keep calling him the “co-president” or “acting president.” And they should sneer that Trump is merely carrying out Musk’s orders. The orange-dyed cesspool of retributive fragility will boil over if he believes people consider him to be no more than the organ grinder’s monkey.
Trump thinks he’s in charge. On Feb 4, he told reporters, “Elon can’t do—and won’t do—anything without our approval. We’ll give him the approval where appropriate.” It's cute that he thinks Musk cares about “approval.” Trump has finally met a man with an ego more toxically inflated than his. A man who also has a messianic belief in his mission that the dilettante Donald has never come close to emulating.
That is not Elon’s only advantage over his nominal boss. Say what you will about the world’s richest thug, he’s a hard worker. Trump may stay up until all hours banging out fat-fingered typos from his gilded throne. But that’s a symptom of drug-induced insomnia. It does not reflect the sleep-in-the-office, Energizer bunny fanaticism Musk brings to his scorched earth fantasies — which reportedly is also enabled by PEDs.
Elon is also 25 years younger than the aging buffoon saddled with a family history of Alzheimer's. As far as I know, Musk’s parents — who are Trump’s contemporaries — are still compos mentis. Although Elon once described his father, Errol, as a "terrible human being". Adding: "Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done." Sound familiar?
Trump has already floated the idea he will stay in office past his sell-by date. But regardless of constitutional shenanigans or a naked power grab, the sand is running out on that miserable man’s mortal term. Musk, who is already acting extra-judicially, can remain a cancer on the body politic for another quarter century. And he would still only be the age Trump is now.
Let the Democrats keep calling Musk the boss, and Trump will turn on him as surely as he has stabbed so many of his erstwhile allies in the back. Elon will soon discover that a President who ignores the rule of law and demands and commands the loyalty of his cabinet officers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, will launch legal armageddon against the targets of his displeasure. Especially as the unguided missile has a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court majority cleaning his judicial toilets.
If Trump does not have the patience for the legal process, expect him to perform a ‘Yevgeny Prigozhin’ on Musk’s ass. Why not? His compliant SCOTUS has already given the career criminal carte blanche to ‘officially’ do whatever he wants.
