It would be interesting how the translation of Elon's interview would sound in German Musk with Donald Trump. The richest man on the planet so obediently and quietly agreed with his guest on the social network "X" using the colloquial "yeah" that the burghers around the Rhine would hear a long and repetitive "Ja, Ja, Ja". And in the end, the conversation between the two was not devoid of romance. Touching on his meeting with Kim Jong-un, which took place in Singapore in 2018, the Republican said that he and the North Korean dictator had a "dinner", a "good relationship" and generally "everything".
"He really liked me. And I got on really well with him. By the way, he's the absolute boss there." This emotional depth and impressiveness comes from a former executive and candidate for the White House, not from the Instagram profile of a Bulgarian influencer who went "to Dubai".
Rough caresses, of course, go with the imposition of authority and subordination. So Trump once again presented himself as tough and sharp (unlike Joe Biden/Kamala Harris). For this purpose, he even predicted the availability of a tool: the US had to acquire a defense system like the Israeli "Iron Dome". Leaving aside the fact that Washington is Israel's main partner in the production of this air defense complex (more than half of it is made in the USA) and that the Americans already possess two batteries of it. The "Iron Dome" problem for Washington it's a double. One time, it cannot be integrated with other US defense system, because if that happens, Tel Aviv will get data related to US air defense. Second time, given that the system in question is oriented towards neutralizing threats coming from close range, "Iron Dome" would not be needed by the US unless Alabama decided to invade Georgia, disputing its border along the Chattahoochee River. Or if Mexico doesn't decide it's time to take back Texas.
But let's leave these nagging little things aside - the rise of Trump in American politics has shown us unequivocally that expertise does not matter.
Pleasure implies filth, and a cynic would even add that the relationship between the two is proportional. In the words of the Republican presidential candidate, his European Union partners "benefit greatly from the United States in trade"; they are "not as strong as China, but they are bad". Bad as bad, and not in a good way. Just think: the candidate of one of the two main political formations in the USA thinks that the most important and closest partner of his country, with which they are in a single military-political alliance, is bad (my point of view as a European tells me, that the EU is often outrageously and irresponsibly good to the US).
Of course, the European Union should not apologize to anyone, including the US, for having a positive trade balance. The point here is different (and in this, gripped by pre-election populism, the Democrats and Republicans in the US are alike): the thief calls "hold the thief". Yes, a number of sectors of the EU economy are heavily subsidized. However, it was Donald Trump who rehabilitated protectionist measures in the American economy when, as president, he introduced subsidies for American farmers and imposed a number of tariffs - including on aluminum and steel - against his main trading partners. Earlier this year, the Republican promised that if he won the White House, he would impose a universal 10% tariff on all imports. During his term, Joe Biden also decided to hit the EU in the crotch, introducing subsidies and tax preferences to American manufacturers of electric cars, batteries, solar panels and semiconductors.
That is, the doctor saw that the patient was sick, and instead of curing him, he decided to make him sick too.
What knocked, called, an American would say. And you would be right. But then we must leave the hypocrisy that the knocker and the caller are different: there are no healthy here, we are all sick. No matter how distorted the free market in the EU is, nobody in this part of Europe thinks, as Donald Trump said some time ago, that "trade wars are good and easy to win". No, they are not: the US trade deficit with the EU increased by 27% in the first quarter of the year, statistics show. Perhaps the Americans should start looking for the problem within themselves and only then - in Europe. Wunderbar!
Otherwise, Donald Trump is absolutely right when he points out that relative to the US, the European NATO quota does not help Ukraine enough, given that Russia is more of a danger to the Old Continent than to North America. In other words, why should the American taxpayer dig deeper to solve European problems when the Europeans themselves will not (here this logic implies Trump's reductionist understanding of international relations processes)? But this is a perfectly popular thesis in American society. If the EU had responded to Russian aggression towards Ukraine quickly and seriously, rather than half-heartedly and sluggishly, perhaps neither Vladimir Putin nor Donald Trump would be talking so much today.
However, the key dimension of the conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk should not be found in the otherwise well-known views of the Republican towards the international system and US foreign policy, combining criticism of its allies and undisguised respect for East Asian autocracies.
Actually, the conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was not so much an interview as a discussion between like-minded people. Therefore, Musk should not be criticized for the way he conducted this event: the "X" was the table around which two friends had gathered to discuss politics. With the same naivety and childishness with which the grandmothers do this in front of the apartment block in a suburb of Sofia. And with the same professionalism and competence with which Trump said years ago that he sold Norway F-52 fighter jets that only existed in a computer game.
If during the rendezvous the Republican repeated his well-known theses, the question is whether he was able to reach new users of this information. Because that's one of the main reasons why his campaign has been floundering for the last two or three weeks: he's talking to the same people, ie. fails to amplify its message. The latter is hard to come by when he deals with the ethnicity of Kamala Harris and compares the size of the crowds he and she draw at their campaign events. When Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News that Trump should stop questioning the size of Harris's supporters and start questioning her positions, the former House speaker was actually expressing a universal sentiment among Republicans that Trump is wasting valuable time , structuring their messages incorrectly. In fact, the presidential candidate seemed to have taken a lesson from the growing friendly criticism of him, and in his exchange with Musk, he attacked Harris in substance, touching on the Democratic candidate's main weaknesses related to the economy, crime and illegal immigration .
As friends with benefits ("Friends with benefits", after the slime film of the same name with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake) who once shared a common attraction to the Democratic Party, the exercise between Trump and Musk was beneficial for both.
The Republican needed some kind of large-scale public display, since for the first time he found himself in a position to catch up to the Democratic candidate. A New York Times/Siena College poll out of the day showed Harris leading Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, with her doing dramatically better among both men and women than Joe Biden's previous numbers in those electorates. groups across the country. In fact, since Biden's replacement with Harris, the news and information flow has predominantly revolved around the Democrats, which also contributed to the selection of a candidate for vice president in the person of Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz. And against this backdrop, Trump seemed to have reached the limit of his momentum. At one point, when the former president was even absent from public for a few days, his campaign was overwhelmingly led by JD Vance (by the way, Trump's absence during the height of the campaign and his distinct fumbling in the conversation with Musk gave rise to some unkind speculation). Either way, Trump's campaign lexicon has begun to expire; from the outside, it looks like the Republican is re-entering the rut of four years ago, when he fought and lost an election he won.
Musk, for his part, managed to bring one of its most colorful users back to his social network. A zoo is worth nothing if it doesn't have a lion in it. If we still don't know what the benefit of Donald Trump's participation in "X" will be, then that of Musk is already clear: the appearance of the Republican on the social network in question had the effect of a stone thrown into the swamp (due to the disputed calculation of this to how far the conversation between the two reached, no numbers will be given here. But it can certainly be said that this was the media event of the day).
But beyond the utilitarian calculations, the sweat-soaked symbiosis between Musk and Trump has certainly brought them mutual satisfaction. Leave the aesthetics for the people who love each other. For others, there is sex. Like "Friends with Privileges", in which Mila Kunis' character asks "why they never made a movie about what happened after they kissed". They did, replies the incarnation of Justin Timberlake. "It's called porn".
And that's a genre that Donald Trump is good at, according to Manhattan court court records. It remains to be seen how many new viewers his fling with Elon Musk reached, and whether they were impressed by the Republican's iron dome.