The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, after spending his week promoting misinformation about FEMA’s role in the Hurricane Helene recovery efforts, flew to Butler, Pennsylvania to participate in over-the-top political theater with Donald Trump.
Musk pranced around the stage like an idiot on edibles and seemed to forget the evening’s theme of a ‘somber tribute’ to the victims of Trump’s first and most marketable ‘assassination attempt’.
An opera singer sang ‘Ave Maria’ before Trump delivered his usual rambling, xenophobic screed with the enthusiasm of a distracted toll collector working a double shift on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The very next day, Musk launched ‘America PAC’ along with a website offering to pay $30 an hour with bonuses for performance for MAGA folks to help ‘register voters’ in the seven swing states.
He also changed his profile pic to an image of himself at the rally wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat behind an American flag.
Not that his loyalty was in question but he has now fully embraced the toxic MAGA iconography.
He spewed lies about ‘illegal voters’ from the stage and has now fully embraced and helped foment the right-wing rhetoric that has dominated the news cycle in recent weeks.
What Musk is doing is both dangerous and unprecedented - and I am not sure we have developed a coherent response.
But we must.
We have to push back on the lies and disinformation that Musk and Trump are serving up online and in their media appearances.
The lies concerning FEMA and accusing the White House and V.P. Harris of not offering aid to the storms victims were a new low and of course wholly untrue.
A lie travels faster than the truth; in many of our recent media cycles it feels as if he who lies the loudest wins.
This is unacceptable if we want to hold on to our democracy.
In North Carolina, which seems to be the epicenter of the focus for pushing the false narrative about FEMA and the Biden Administration, it was of course left out of the discussion how 15 years of Republican control of the North Carolina legislature made the damage that occurred during the storms much worse.
The GOP there has blocked all sorts of new building codes and regulations designed to save lives during storms - under pressure and massive contributions from developers and construction firms who want to build homes on steep slopes vulnerable to landslides and cut corners in construction that could save lives during flooding and wind damage from catastrophic storms.
They also have weakened protections for wetlands that aid in preventing storm water runoff and can prevent flood damage.
The Republican legislature even went so far as to pass a law that prevented the state from adopting any new building codes until 2031.
It was subsequently vetoed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper - and then the lawmakers blocked his veto.
They have gone out of their way as a state to make homeowners more vulnerable; making the construction of homes both cheaper for the builder and more dangerous to the consumer.
The GOP legislature has also lost out on an estimated 70 million dollars worth of FEMA grants to fund climate-resilient construction projects.
Republicans always side with industry and against regulations that would save lives - especially when it has anything to do with climate change, which their donors in the oil and gas industry prohibit them from addressing or even acknowledging.
In Florida, Governor DeSantis signed a bill that deletes any reference to climate change from state law.
These facts often don’t make it down to the voters or often the people who have been victimized by these storms.
There’s an entire culture in place to shield them from the truth.
Trump’s stunt in Georgia on Monday was a great example of that, as he lied repeatedly about V.P. Harris and the Biden administration being M.I.A. in the face of the destruction.
Nothing could be further from the truth but a man with no morality doesn’t need the truth when lies are so effective.
Another storm is headed for the Gulf Coast of Florida this week and I am sure Trump and his surrogates are praying for maximum damage so they can campaign on misinformation.
Of course they are supported in all this by Republican governors who are nothing but toadstools and servants of their corporate donors and MAGA overlords.
It’s both tragic and pathetic.
But it is an attempt to both control the narrative and write the script as they go.
If what you have seen over the past several months, especially concerning Trump’s ‘assassination attempt’ doesn’t seem to add up in your mind, trust that feeling.
Both the martyr and the hero act is a big part of the narrative for would-be authoritarians - and make no mistake that is MAGA’s end game.
Intuition is rarely wrong, it is the reason dogs bark when they see Donald Trump. (Something I have witnessed with my own eyes on several occasions and part of the reason he hates dogs - they sense his evil ways).
It is why many observer’s first reaction to the events in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13th were that his reaction appeared staged.
The visuals didn’t add up and the facts haven’t since.
It was a campaign commercial with live rounds in my opinion: the Trump I know would have no problem sacrificing one of his followers to help his re-election campaign.
His ‘Fight, fight, fight’ histrionics did not seem genuine to me; I don’t believe he felt he was in any danger or hadn’t rehearsed his response. (He lied to his followers last night and said the first thing he did when he got up was ask the Secret Service agents if anyone was hurt - a lie. He asked for his shoes and insisted they move on his cue after he fixed his hair).
That’s what my gut tells me - and it’s reinforced in observing how Trump has monetized the events to build a narrative around the fact that he ‘took a bullet for democracy’.
The lack of any medical report concerning his injury and the lie from Ronnie Jackson that he had a two centimeter wound on his ear only adds to my skepticism.
Don’t even get me started on Donald showing up at the Republican National Convention with a cocktail napkin taped to his ear.
Or shipping out the fallen fireman’s coat to Milwaukee to be used as a prop in Trump’s theatrical one man show about the events, or his statement that he would only discuss it that night ‘for the first and last time’ and has talked about it every day since, simultaneously creating a new industry to sell images from that day.
Including the latest grift which is a small brass stature of his ‘iconic moment’.
This joins the coffee table book, NFT and gold sneakers with an image of his ‘heroics’ emblazoned on them which are now sold out.
WWE-type iconography sells - and nobody knows that better than Donald Trump.
I’ve known Trump since the late 1990s when he ran his beauty pageants and ‘Trump Model Management’ as a front for his sexual predation.
I have observed him well into the ‘Apprentice’ era when as a failed businessman and and full-time con artist turned mob-money launderer was repackaged into a ‘billionaire business savant’ by Mark Burnett and greedy NBC executives.
The show was a fraud and a grift.
Nothing is ever as it appears in Trump world; from his self-serving and exploitative lies in the hours after 9/11 to the way he has used the suffering of Hurricane Helene victims to spread misinformation and further his own grift.
He is not a man who deserves the benefit of the doubt on anything.
If questioning the optics of the Butler event (where tragically folks were killed and wounded) sounds like a conspiracy theory, guess what?
January 6th WAS a conspiracy - they exist.
Trump routinely engages in fraud and conspiracies to serve his interests.
The entire Trump empire was built on fraud and conspiracy, from Fred Trump Sr., double-billing upgrades to his buildings to cheat on his taxes and bilk his tenants, to Donald’s myriad fake building projects where he ripped off investors like Trump Baja, Toronto or Soho.
Trump’s children got in on the act, led by Vanky who was the polished spokesmodel of their deceptive practices, showing up at investor pitches promising she would soon be your neighbor and borrow a cup of sugar from you when you moved into your beautiful new Trump condo (that was never to be built - deposit non-refundable).
To her stubble brothers who slurped up the receipts and hid their father’s company’s fraud from the I.R.S., banks and beyond.
The Trump Organization was found guilty for these very practices in New York State just his year. Trump is a criminal.
All this is to say - we are facing a challenge unlike any other we have faced in the final month of this election.
Trump’s campaign is already lining up lawyers to challenge the results on election night and I am sure there are plans in place to foment chaos and intimidate poll workers and electors in the weeks and months leading up to certifying the election results.
Unless they (God forbid) win outright or by fraud on election night and a stunned nation does not know how to react in a timely fashion - we’re back to where we were nine years ago - at the beginning of a national nightmare.
We cannot go back or allow that to happen.
We must turn out to vote in numbers so large that a Harris/Walz victory is not only obvious to the American people but to the Free World beyond.
Every day between now and then counts.
Vote Blue.
It's beyond belief that nearly half the voting population supports this charlatan! Worse than that, it's terrifying. How can the rest of the world regard the US as anything other than moronic racists when Trump’s rambling ranting is so effective that the election is on a knife edge?
America needs a miracle to save itself from itself!
Thank you. And thank you for this image: …with the enthusiasm of a distracted toll collector working a double shift on the New Jersey Turnpike.