Trump's 'first buddy' is in deep you-know-what

18 November 2024

Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X looks on during the Milken Conference 2024 Global Conference Sessions at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 6, 2024. REUTERS/David Swanson/File Photo

The two finalists to become Trump’s Treasury Secretary — the person will have a major hand in cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising tariffs so everyone pays more — are Howard Lutnick, who’s CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Trump’s co-transition chair, and Steven Bessent, the founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management.

Lutnick had been in the lead but a few days ago, according to the The Wall Street Journal, he heard from Trump’s allies that he might not get the nod.

So Lutnick turned for help to Elon Musk, who now calls himself Trump’s “First Buddy.” Bessent’s supporters also reached out to Musk to endorse Bessent, which tells you alot about the palace intrigue going on now in Mar-a-Lago, and how much power Musk is now wielding.

Yesterday, Musk, posted on his X that Lutnick would be a better choice for treasury secretary than Bessent:

“My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change. Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”

I’ve spent quite some time around presidents and president-elects and even advised them about personnel decisions. The most basic rule of such advice-giving is you never make your advice public.

Doing so puts the president-elect in an impossible position: If he does what you’ve publicly urged him to do — even if he was going to do it anyway — your public advocacy makes it look as if you pushed him into it, so he seems to be your patsy.

If the president-elect is Donald Trump, who thinks mainly in terms of dominance and submission, you’re playing with fire.

Bad enough that Musk broke this basic rule. He went even further, publicly encouraging his nearly 205 million followers on X to weigh in, in favor of Lutnick.

So Musk has very publicly cornered Trump. If Trump names Lutnick, it looks as if all Musk needs to do from now on is publicly urge Trump to do this or that, with the implicit threat of getting his 205 million followers stirred up to follow suit, and Trump will do it. Musk becomes de facto President.

I don’t know what Trump will do but I’m sure he’s seething. The most likely outcome is Trump doesn’t offer the job to either Lutnick nor Bessent, and fires Musk.

Musk’s public advocacy of Lutnick because he will “enact change” rather than “business-as-usual” also signals Musk’s and Trump’s criterion for filling high-level positions (besides unbridled fealty to Trump): The picks don’t need to know anything or share any large vision of the public good. They just have to be bomb-throwers who’ll shake things up.

The worst that can be said of any candidate is he’ll govern as usual.

Trump is well on his way to “crush the system,” as he promised — which most Americans appear to want because the “as usual” system has for decades been rewarding big-money donors, monopolists, CEOs living off government contracts (like Musk) and fat-cat denizens of Wall Street (like Lutnick and Bessent) — all of whom have been siphoning off most economic gains for themselves.

But if the new system that Trump installs (with or without Musk’s help) siphons off even more of the gains for those at the top, while destroying what’s left of our democracy, most Americans will find themselves even worse off and more resentful.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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