Wrangling Pirates

 Well, this was a week "when men fell out, they knew not why," to borrow a phrase from Butler's Hudibras. For some reason, Trump and Elon Musk suddenly started hating each other the last few days. And I can't pretend I haven't enjoyed the spectacle. The great thing about two utterly horrible people criticizing each other, is that everything each says against the other is entirely justified. 

Trump is right that Musk is erratic, possibly drug-addled, and most likely motivated by various financial conflicts of interest (the electric vehicle subsidies he would lose out on if the current tax and spending package passes, e.g.). Meanwhile, Musk is absolutely correct that Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" would be a disaster for the national debt and a ruinous blow to future generations. 

That's not to say I'm ready to join some Bay Area liberals in inviting Musk back into the Democratic fold. Being responsible for the preventable deaths of roughly 300,000 people—two thirds of them children—because you precipitously destroyed U.S. humanitarian assistance around the world, including for such basic necessities as malaria- and HIV-prevention—is not something I can easily overlook. 

But I do think Musk will manage to take some of the MAGA coalition with him in the divorce. And if these two men manage to destroy each other and the ghoulish political movement they have built, that can only be a good thing. 

Of course, we all saw it coming. I can hardly claim to be the only one who predicted Musk and Trump would eventually fall out. But I was definitely on record prophesying that this day would come. 

Over at my other blog, I quoted a line on this subject from Shakespeare's Richard III. After the erstwhile Gloucester and his cronies have turned against each other—once they have attained ill-gotten power—a character describes them as a group of "wrangling pirates" who fall out with one another because they can't agree on how to divvy up the loot. 

That seems to be what happened here. We had two utterly narcissistic, unsophisticated, astonishingly stupid and cruel individuals who proposed to more or less take over the world together. They came appallingly close to succeeding. One of them is the president of the world's most powerful country; the other the world's richest man—despite their total lack of qualifications for either post. 

But once it came time to share out the spoils of their conquest—this is predictably what doomed them. There's no honor among thieves, and there was none among these two. This is what happens to Richard III as well in Shakespeare's play—who, as I once observed on this blog, during the first Trump administration—"has given us a kind of universal syntax of tyranny -- a hidden grammar of villainy."

Part of this universal general grammar of villainy is that the villain will always fail in the end because they are simply incapable of working with others. The very thing that makes them a villain—their narcissism, their cupidity, their malice—prevents them from enjoying the spoils that their crimes have bequeathed to them. 

They always end up like the tyrant of Syracuse in Cicero's famous anecdote—who lies on a bed of luxury, but has to live every day in paranoid fear of being stabbed in the back by his own henchmen, because he is incapable of developing mutual relationships that breed loyalty. Cicero's point was that however rich and powerful, the mortal condition of such tyrants is anything but enviable. 

"Not for all his faith can see / Would I that cowléd churchman be," as Emerson once wrote. And not for all the riches in the stock market, likewise, would I change places with Trump or Musk. Their lives must be a constant misery—because they are incapable of retaining actual friends.