Opinion
Maureen Dowd
Musk’s
Lost Boys and Trump’s Mean Girls
Feb. 8, 2025
Maureen Dowd
By Maureen
Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/opinion/trump-musk-doge.html
Tom Stoppard
wrote in “The Real Thing,” his enticing play about infidelity: “To marry one
actress is unfortunate. To marry two is simply asking for it.”
Here’s a
political corollary: To elect one Emperor of Chaos is unfortunate. To let two
run the government is simply asking for it.
Presidents
Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions,
conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the
Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing
styles.
With a
pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government
— and the globe.
Queasy D.C.
denizens are waiting anxiously to see if judges can save the country from the
scofflaws running it.
The two
unchecked and unbalanced billionaires are entwined in a heady and
earth-shattering relationship.
“I love
@realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Musk posted
on X on Friday.
He may
simply be offering affection to ward off any jealousy Trump felt when he saw
Time’s new cover illustration: Musk in the Oval behind the Resolute Desk.
Elon Musk is
brainy but he’s not your usual presidential brain trust.
Although
everyone in Washington, including some in Trump’s inner circle, expect the two
pathological narcissists to barrel into each other, they both seem to be
getting what they want from the relationship.
Trump loves
to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to
the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says
“killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by
revenge to smash up the government.
The
president and the tech lord even have progeny, little Elons: the lost boys of
DOGE, a gang of Gen-Zers in jeans with backpacks and bags of Doritos bursting
into federal agencies to gut them and force bureaucrats to justify their
existence.
Their
backgrounds and work are shrouded in secrecy, even as they access the
government’s most sensitive information.
“Muskrats,”
as the bureaucrats they call “dinosaurs” named them, are rifling the
government’s computers. A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym “Big Balls”
lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was
ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, “I was racist before it was cool,” and
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian
hate.” Even though he is married to an Indian American, Vice President JD Vance
rescued the “kid,” as he called him, and helped him get his job back.
It’s not
that we don’t need to rein in spending, including what is spent on risibly P.C.
programs. But the disdain for Congress and the rule of law, and the glee at
erasing so many jobs and programs, as if there is no human cost, is
reprehensible. We are, after all, only carbon-based beings.
The lost
boys of DOGE fit in well with the “Mean Girls” attitude of Trump’s Washington.
On Friday, the DOGE X account posted before-and-after pictures of the U.S.
Agency for International Development entrance; they had stripped it of all
identification. Their post even trolled Kamala Harris, using her viral phrase:
“Unburdened by what has been.”
The Silicon
Valley digerati don’t care about the old world in Washington, D.C., churning
out meddlesome regulations, laws and taxes. They are cocky about creating a new
world, shaped by a new species, A.I.
Donald and
Elon are emotional time bombs, lashing out in the crudest and cruelest ways.
Trump’s amoral, puerile, wrecking-ball style is now squared by Musk’s.
It’s rich
that the world’s richest man is rooting around trying to wipe out vast numbers
of government workers, saying, “Sorry, you can’t have your $85,000 a year job
and your health insurance.”
“They don’t
care if the government delivers food or comes in and rescues your town from a
flood or teaches poor kids in the inner city because they don’t have to live
through any of those things themselves,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.
“They’re rich and powerful, so they’re insulated from consequences of their
actions.”
Trump cares
about being popular and Musk doesn’t. So their relationship will probably
remain strong until Elon cuts so many benefits from the Trump faithful that
they tell Trump they no longer love him.
And the
bromance may not end with a bang. It could very well end with a bot.
When Trump
turns 80, as a birthday present, Elon and the lost boys could create an
A.I.-fueled Trump bot, a real-time video head trained on his news conferences
and everything he has ever tweeted.
Jaron
Lanier, the father of virtual reality, slyly says that Trump would be “an
unusually easy person to plausibly fake.”
“Gradually
it’ll be normalized,” Lanier told me. “People will get used to it more and
more, and then it’ll actually start to be treated as the president. If you look
at it on your phone or your computer, it would look just like him. The
underlying software could be presented as a hologram onstage. It might even run
in the next election. And they’ll go to the Supreme Court and say, ‘We know
that the president can only have two terms, but this isn’t really the
president. This is the Trump bot and A.I.s are people, too.’ Essentially
allowing a continuation of the same administration into a third term.”
All Hail
President Trump Bot, engineered by Elon Musk.
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