The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Elon. He may be a loathsome conspiracist. But in this case, he may be...
Posted by Sia on July 9, 2025, 2:33 pm ADMIN
The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Elon
He may be a loathsome conspiracist. But in this case, he may be a useful, loathsome conspiracist.
By William Kristol - July 9th
No friendship with Donald Trump can last for very long. We’ve seen plenty of examples: Michael Cohen, “Sloppy” Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Elon Musk—and now Vladimir Putin. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said yesterday. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
So weird that Trump is the first person to figure this out!
Happy Wednesday.
One Cheer for Elon?
by William Kristol
Last week, when Elon Musk started talking about forming a third party, several friends and acquaintances got in touch to ask: Wasn’t this an opportunity for us Trump critics?
I was skeptical.
I doubted Musk was serious. He has a long history of making promises and then not following through. To say the least, Elon Musk isn’t someone you can count on.
He’s also not someone with whom you want to associate. Musk is a loathsome person who’s done a lot of damage to this country and the world, both as part of the Trump administration and otherwise. He’s certainly no reliable ally in the fight for a decent liberal democracy.
And many of my correspondents are centrist types yearning for a new centrist third party. I’m dubious about such an enterprise. But even if there’s more of a case for this than I’m inclined to think, I didn’t see how Elon Musk could help such an effort.
I believe my skepticism was reasonable. But to some degree I’m rethinking it. I’m not rethinking my judgment about Musk’s deplorable character, nor the fact that he can’t be the person who spearheads a responsible and centrist-oriented third party. But it does now seem that Musk may be more serious about this initiative than I expected. And it very much seems that this party would be attacking Trump not from the responsible center but from the extremist and conspiracist right.
Which brings us to Jeffrey Epstein. The fact that Musk joined enthusiastically in the complaints from MAGA true believers about the betrayal of the promise to release the Epstein files is important. (More on that in Quick Hits, below.) If Musk had just kept complaining about the budget deficit, I’d have remained skeptical that he is serious about hurting Trump. But Musk does seem to have figured out that the best way to go after Trump is to embrace Trumpist conspiracy theories, and ask why Trump is abandoning his conspiracist promises. To hurt Trump, you have to go hunting where the MAGA ducks are. And they don’t dwell in the budget spreadsheets. They paddle around in the conspiracist pond.
Prying some of those extremist and conspiracist voters away from Trump, and from Republican candidates in the midterms, would be a good thing. It would help increase the chances that more Democrats, who believe in liberal democracy, would win.
Is it an unfortunate reflection on the situation we now face that such an expedient may be needed?
Perhaps. But the current situation, an ongoing authoritarian takeover of our government, is grave.
Is it an unfortunate reflection on human nature itself that such an expedient may be necessary, or at least useful? Yes. But it may simply be a fact that sometimes it takes a conspiracist to pry away some conspiracist voters. It takes an extremist to pry away extremists. It takes a bigot to pry away bigots. Such devices aren’t pleasant. But they could be helpful.
After all, as Federalist No. 51 teaches us—admittedly in a somewhat different context—“It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of the government.” Preserving free government depends on supplying “the defect of better motives.”
One tip-off that Musk is on to something is that Donald Trump seems worried.
“I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” Trump told reporters Sunday evening. “It’s always been a two-party system, and I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. . . . Third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it but I think it’s ridiculous!”
A little later that evening, Trump seemed to move from pity for Musk’s effort to alarm about it, writing on Truth Social:
I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely “off the rails,” essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States - The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds!
Make no mistake: Trump doesn’t fear disruption and chaos in general. Trump fears disruption and chaos in his coalition. We should welcome disruption and chaos in Trump’s coalition. It would be a very good thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I loathe Elon Musk just as much as I loathe Donald Trump. Indeed, given his apparent lurch over the last 24 hours, via his AI Grok bot, from mere longstanding sympathy to fascism into flat-out pro-Hitlerism, I’m open to the proposition that Musk is more loathsome than Trump.
But Trump controls the federal government. The threat to our liberal democracy comes from him and his administration. Trump can deploy the National Guard and the army. Musk cannot. Trump controls DHS. Musk does not. Trump can use the Justice Department to go after his enemies in a way Musk cannot.
Musk was all for felon when he thought his companies were about to strike cash cow
on July 9, 2025, 2:33 pm
