by A few months ago, before he was the Democratic nominee for vice president along with his current son Kamala Harris, Tim Walz struck gold when he pointed out in an interview how “weird” the Republican party has been in recent years.
It was a word that really struck a chord – not only with Democrats, who have struggled to communicate the change in their colleagues’ ideological positions since 2015, but also with Republicans, who have embraced the small, very personal, and was not. seems to have an answer to it.
I mean, how could they, after the two biggest representatives on the world stage – Donald Trump and Elon Musk – met at a long-awaited rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday evening and gave us… whatever it was?
In theory, the event should be a slam dunk – Trump returning to the site of his assassination attempt, defying death, and with the world’s richest man and “real life Tony Stark” (yes, we really used to call it that).
Instead, what we got was the publicity equivalent of an airball, because the two’s presence together somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts – which probably put us in negative territory. They spread lies, inflamed political tensions, and targeted vulnerable people – all in a day’s work for two men who could afford to pay people to teach them social skills, but instead choose to being the poster boys for “white nationalism, but somehow. even stupid”.
At this point, though, you have to wonder if “weird” is the right word. “Shame” might be better. The pictures to come from the event are sure to be – one shows Musk in the middle of a little half-hop and Trump is looking at him like a disappointed father; Musk is leaning on someone else to talk to Trump with a look on his face that he called “finally, the permission my father ever gave me”.
But I know I’m not really fair, then – people rarely look good in candid photos. What’s really embarrassing is that Musk showed up to do the rally at all, after Trump summarily humiliated him on Truth Social, a Trump-owned competitor to Musk’s awful website, just two years ago then:
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help with his many subsidized projects,” the former president wrote, “whether they be electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rockets that to anywhere, without the subsidies he would be worthless, and telling me he was a big Trump and Republican fan, I could say, ‘Get on your knees and beg,’ and he would He’s done it…”
Well, I guess he finally did, didn’t he? Actually, it probably would have been less embarrassing for him to get down on his knees and beg — not just for Musk, who was humiliated by Trump, but also for Trump, who implicitly acknowledged it while running the rally that he needed campaign help from someone he considers “worthless”. .
Maybe the word is “disgusting”? That’s the word I would use to describe Elon Musk’s prediction “If [Republicans] don’t vote, this is the last election”. It’s the kind of scandal that no democracy should have to deal with, but it’s especially embarrassing when it happens at a rally for the man who led a coup attempt in the previous election.
Did Musk forget that only one of the two candidates described themselves as a “dictator”? Or will Americans no longer have to vote if he wins? I can’t imagine that, to be honest – if I had to guess, I’d say he’s just talking out of his SpaceX.
Maybe “pathetic” is better? It was certainly quite pathetic, the way Trump hit the same old tired talking points. Here he was all hits, treating us like a classic like “Joe Biden paying for sex change operations for illegal immigrants”, and “my political opponents tried to kill me”. At one point he even boasted that he didn’t need a teleprompter… while reading from a teleprompter.
But I think if I really had to pick just one word to describe the American political right as it stands right now – one word that summed up all of their failings, both ideological and personal – it would probably be it would have to be “lost people”.
It is the party of losers like Musk, who are desperate for validation but unable to earn it. He’s the party of losers like JD Vance, who knows he can’t really back up any so-called religion, so he makes up stories about immigrants eating people’s pets to scare voters to be on his side. It is the party of losers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sincerely believes that “they” – whoever “they” are – can control the weather.
And I hope that, after November 5th, it will be a party for the two-time loser, Donald Trump – and we will never have to hear any of his weird, disgusting, disgusting, pathetic ramblings ever again.
