The Art of the Deal: What Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing

Donald Trump was always, it bears repeating, a lousy businessman. To this day, much of his vaunted wealth remains theoretical, while the rest has been sustained through years of creative accounting and endures in spite, rather than because, of any talent for enterprise he might possess – this is a man, remember, who managed to oversee the bankruptcy of multiple casinos in Atlantic City, which is rather like going bust as a peanut salesman in an elephant house.

From Trump Steaks to Trump ‘University’, the 45/47th President of the United States was more or less consistently unsuccessful in selling a shitty product until, in the twilight of his life, he began to sell himself. This may partially account for why such a kinship has developed between Trump and Elon Musk, another shameless grifter whose most successful venture was – for a while – the carefully cultivated image of himself as a genius techno-futurist, or indeed anything other than living, sweating, frog-eyed proof that capitalism bears no relation to a meritocracy.

All that being said, the initial chaotic weeks of Trump’s second term would seem to indicate that he has at least grasped that most basic catechism of business: ‘buy low, sell high’. Specifically, Trump is buying people, and in return selling those useful to him either patronage or protection in exchange for their fealty.

Those of you who do not follow New York politics may be unfamiliar with Eric Adams, its nominally Democratic and profoundly weird mayor, the least of whose eccentricities include referring to himself in the third person and speaking in rhyme; a man who has stated he was put into office by God himself, who attempted to introduce police robots to Times Square, and who may or may not actually live in New Jersey.

Until very recently, Adams’ travails over the past year were my very favourite political soap opera. Beyond his mixture of verbose incoherence and messianic egotism, Adams’ administration has been defined by the ruthless implementation of cuts to public services and a never-ending search for useful scapegoats among the poorest and most marginalised elements of New York’s populace, in particular the homeless and immigrants.

It was therefore amusing, to say the least, when last September Adams became the first sitting NYC mayor in history to be indicted on federal charges, including bribery, wire fraud and illegally soliciting foreign donations from Turkish officials. Despite Adams’ characteristic defiance, the prospects for Adams and his cronies grew increasingly grim, while some entertained the poetic possibility that the mayor could end up in the very prison he had defunded to the tune of $17 million. Enter Trump, stage right.

Last week, the Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors to drop all corruption charges against Adams, without the barest pretence that this was for any reason than naked political utility; instead, Trump’s newly appointed acting deputy attorney general argued the indictment had “restricted” Adams’ ability to tackle “illegal immigration and violent crime”.

The charges, however, can be reopened at any time, should the DOJ wake up one morning and feel the urge. Adams took take the hint, pre-emptively instructing his top officials to refrain from criticising the president in any way, or interfering with immigration enforcement.

The Trump administration’s goal is to demonstrate that nowhere in the United States – not blue states, not sanctuary cities, not even New York – is safe for immigrants, and that if Adams wishes to stay in office and out of jail, he will have to grovellingly supplicate himself before the president’s brutish whims. Trump has bought Adams for pennies, and in return not so much sold as loaned him an extremely precarious measure of security. He will not be the last.

Among the first was Trump’s hapless vice-president JD Vance, who could best be described as a motivated seller. Through the crude analysis of his polemic/misery memoir Hillbilly Elegy – a fresh spin on the ever-popular thesis that those in poverty have no one to blame but themselves – Vance was, for a while, profitably fêted by both moralising conservatives and flailing post-2016 liberals as a whisperer for rural working-class voters that turned to Trump, of whom Vance was once an intermittent critic.

Given the vanishingly little space left on the American Right for such fence-straddling however, Vance quietly acknowledged just how fucked he was, made the performative (and frankly minimal) political evolution necessary to reach full-blown Trumpism, and was rewarded with the dubious prize of the vice-presidency. Once again, buying the loyalty of his latest water-boy cost Trump virtually nothing.

Beyond these direct purchases, the advent of Trump’s second term has led others to signal that they are either up for sale, or wish to emulate his grift. Much of the British Right did not quite know what to make of Trump during his first spell in the White House; though lacking any serious ideological divergence with his administration, many nevertheless treated him as a bizarre, uncouth phenomenon to be kept at arm’s length and regarded with the sniffy disdain English Toryism traditionally reserves for all things American.

Now, no more: Trumpism has gone international. An ascendant Reform, for all its pretensions of being a home-grown phenomenon, clearly hopes the Trump playbook can help it advance beyond where Farage and his coterie have taken them thus far. Elsewhere, inspired by what it obsequiously refers to as Trump’s “modern Gladstonian revolution”, the latest issue of the Spectator promises its own “war on wasteful spending”, encouraging its readers to identify areas “in need of the axe”, with predictable focus given to health, welfare, foreign aid and arts funding.

Take a glance at any of the other house-journals of British conservatism meanwhile, and you will find its correspondents slavering for the same red meat Trump has promised to deliver to his own hateful and fascistic base, hungry for the same licence to inflict revenge and suffering upon immigrants, minorities, trade unions, protestors, LGBT+ people, and baristas with the wrong hair colour.

This is not to say that such instincts were ever restricted solely to the Right: there has been no shortage of centrist, liberal or even ostensibly leftist commentators happy to offer excuses or cautious praise for Trump whenever his goals align with their own, especially if it allows them to bolster the fiction of a nebulous tyranny of wokeness, or enjoy some barely suppressed schadenfreude at its downfall.

All Trump needed to do was sign transphobia into law for Times columnist Janice Turner to hail him as a “feminist hero”, for example; “Some things are right even if the Orange Boogeyman does them, and this is one of them,” wrote the Spectator’s Stephen Daisley following Trump’s sanctioning of the International Criminal Court; “We Have to Take Some Kind of L on Immigration, for Now,” instructed Substack dweeb Freddie deBoer without apparent regret.

When it comes to the Trump administration, these are the people who believe – contrary to the wisdom of dril – that there are in fact some circumstances where you “gotta hand it to them”. If they are not selling themselves to Trump as explicitly as Adams or Vance, they indicating their amenability to the forces of revanchist reaction which he represents. When the discourse inevitably turns to what opposition to Trumpism will look like in 2025’s new world order, remember that.

All of this pales in comparison to the biggest, the most outrageous and quite possibly the most consequential trade-off Trump has made thus far: the elevation and empowerment of Elon Musk, the world’s richest sentient slime mould, and now arguably the second most powerful man in America.

Musk has, along with a gaggle of post-adolescent psychopaths who represent the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency’s Sardaukar, been granted almost unfettered access to all federal agencies, within which they now crawl like Gremlins, stripping copper wire from the walls in their crusade to eliminate any ‘wasteful spending’ that might actually serve the public good.

In light of the understandable incredulity Musk’s blitzkrieg upon the American state has elicited, it is worth remembering what is and is not without precedent. There has been no point in the past century where the United States could be called anything but a corporatocracy; while the quote may be apocryphal, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” is nevertheless a fair summation of the philosophy that has guided every administration since the Second World War.

Trump’s grubby deal-making echoes that of the Gilded Age, when corruption was so endemic some legislatures simply legalised bribery, while DOGE’s plans for mass federal layoffs recall Ronald Reagan’s simultaneous 1981 firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers – an act of strikebreaking from which the American labour movement never recovered.

What is without precedent is Musk himself, a man who manages to make other crazed billionaires look good by comparison (say what you want about Howard Hughes, but at least he built shit that actually flew); a man who, based on outward appearances, may or may not believe at any given time that he is right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo; a man who, crucially, has proven over and over again that he lacks even the most basic comprehension of how systems work, and who has now been unleashed on those systems upon which the day-to-day functionality of the United States depends. As Defector’s David Roth put it:

“The professed idea here, which is no less dangerous for how fatuous it is, is to run the government not just like a business, but like a technology start-up. For Musk, this is more or less cosplay – a ‘start-up’, is when everyone sleeps in the office and barely gets paid and does whatever he says as soon as he says it. What that reimagining amounts to, in this case, is taking something big and making it small enough and weak enough that he can control it.”

A coaction between capital and the state has typified fascism since its very beginnings, but the alliance of Trump and Musk may represent its most hideously perfect symbiosis yet; there is no conflict between the piratical rapacity of DOGE and the dead-eyed ideological goals of Project 2025, nor is there any between the far-right plutocrat in the Oval Office and the far-right plutocrat his has let slip upon the American state.

Believe it or not, less than a year ago, many were duped into believing that Musk was on the back-heel, with no one to blame but himself. As Ed Zitron wrote in March of 2024, Musk has always failed to appreciate that billionaires should avoid scrutiny – that “in their ideal world, only a few people would know that these billionaires existed, making the reasons to hate them – tax dodges and monopolies, for example – too complex or obtuse for the average person to get really angry about.”

But Musk’s rampaging ego and wretched, unquenchable need for veneration could never abide by this. Despite being rich enough not to care what anyone thinks, Musk – plainly, screamingly, pathetically – cares deeply, which for a while made it seem possible for the mob to reach out through the very medium which Musk sought to control, prick his paper-thin skin and make him bleed. Musk never forgave us for that, and the American people are now living through his revenge.

“This ketamine-addled neo-Nazi nerd can and will buy and exert unprecedented power over the ungrateful masses, in the service of an administration whose vulgar, paranoid fascist instincts so perfectly align with his own.”

Musk must know by now that the dream which once, briefly, appeared to be coming true – that he would be recognised as a great visionary of the age, a space-straddling saviour of humanity, Tony Stark and Lex Luthor rolled into one weird, pale, doughy package – is now dead forever. In lieu of that dream, this ketamine-addled neo-Nazi nerd can and will buy and exert unprecedented power over the ungrateful masses, in the service of an administration whose vulgar, paranoid fascist instincts so perfectly align with his own.

The performer, comedian and bright spot in a godless universe Brennan Lee Mulligan once argued that personality predates ideology – “meaning before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole”. While the first Trump administration was inarguably defined by Trump’s personality, it increasingly looks as though the next four years will be stamped with that of Musk. Perhaps that was part of the deal.

Donald Trump bought Elon Musk by giving him everything he believes he is owed, and in return sold him the United States of America.