A few months ago, before becoming the Democratic nominee alongside vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Tim Walz struck gold by noting in an interview how “weird” the Republican party had become in the last few years.
This was a really intriguing word; Not only for Democrats who have struggled to articulate the shift in their opponents’ ideological positions since 2015, but also for Republicans who are taking this situation very, very personally and not taking it seriously. Seems to have an answer to that.
I mean, how could two of their greatest representatives on the world stage — Donald Trump and Elon Musk — meet at a long-awaited rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening and give us… whatever it is?
In theory, this event should have been a slam dunk: Trump returning to the site of the assassination attempt, defying death and accompanied by the world’s richest man and the “real-life Tony Stark” (yes, that’s what we really call him).
Instead, we ended up with the propaganda equivalent of an air cannon, as the combined presence of the two men somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts – arguably putting us in some pretty negative territory. They spread lies, inflamed political tensions and targeted the vulnerable; It was all in a day’s work for two men who could have paid people to teach them social skills, but instead “chose to be the poster boys for white nationalism, but somehow.” even more stupid”.
But at this point you have to wonder if “weird” is the right word anymore. Maybe “embarrassing” would be better. The photos to come out of the event are definitely like this: One shows Musk in the middle of a cheerful little half-hop while Trump looks on like a disappointed father; in another, Musk leans in to talk to Trump with a look on his face that reads “finally the approval my father never gave me.”
But I know I’m not actually fair; People rarely look good in candid photos. What’s actually a shame is that Trump showed up to attend the rally just two years ago, after Musk had recently disparaged him on Truth Social, a rival of Trump’s own lousy website:
“Elon Musk came to the White House and asked me for help with his many subsidized projects,” the former president wrote. “Whether it’s electric cars that don’t last long enough, driverless cars that crash, rocket ships that don’t go anywhere, I wonder what subsidies would be nothing without.” It wouldn’t work, and I could have said, ‘I could have gotten down on my knees and begged,’ while he was telling me what a big Trump fan and Republican he was, and he would have done it…”
I think he finally did it, right? Actually, it would probably be a little less embarrassing to get on your knees and beg; not just for Musk, whom Trump despises, but also for Trump, who, while organizing the rally, implicitly admitted that he needed campaign help from someone he deemed “unworthy.” .
Maybe the word is “disgusting”? This is the word I would use to describe Elon Musk’s prediction: “If [Republicans] “Don’t vote, this will be the last election.” This is the kind of fearmongering that no democracy can handle, but it is doubly disgusting that it happened at the rally of the man who oversaw an attempted insurrection in the previous election.
Did Musk forget that only one of the two candidates described himself as a “dictator”? Or that if he wins, Americans “won’t have to vote anymore”? I honestly can’t imagine him doing this; If I had to guess, I’d say he was talking about SpaceX.
Maybe “pathetic” is better? It was definitely pretty pathetic to see Trump hit the same old tired talking points. Here he played all the hits and treated us to classics like “Joe Biden is paying for gender reassignment operations on illegal immigrants” and “my political opponents tried to kill me.” He even boasted at one point that he didn’t need a teleprompter when reading from it.
But I guess if I really had to pick one word to describe the American political right as it stands — one word that sums up all of its failures, both ideological and personal — I think it would be “losers.”
This is the party of losers like Musk, desperate for validation but completely incapable of earning it. This is the party of losers like J.D. Vance, who knew he couldn’t support any of his so-called beliefs and made up stories about immigrants eating people’s pets to scare voters into getting them on his side. This is the party of losers who, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, seem to sincerely believe that “they” — whoever they are — can control the weather.
And hopefully on November 5th it will be the party of two-time loser Donald Trump and we never have to hear his weird, embarrassing, disgusting, pathetic nonsense again.