The battle of les géant enfant terrible, By Hal M. Brown Will we see Elon Musk annoucing that he's running for president even though he's not eligibnle to BE president?

The bromance between Trump and Musk is over. 

Now we have one géant enfant terrible doing battle with another. I’m not sure if the French is correct. It is supposed to mean “the giant terrible infants.”

I woke today, made my coffee, turned on MSNBC, and the story is still on the news. It seem to be as juicy as a dirty diaper and just as pungent.

So far the majority of pundits are saying that Trump is winning the battle for MAGA minds. In fact, as long as it is dominating the news for another cycle Musk is winning. 

Speculation seems pretty even as to whether a kiss and make up moment is in the offing. The chattering class is pointing out the list of Trump’s former rivals , critics, and enemies who are now kissing the Royal Ass - case in point, Little Marco. Musk, however, is no Little Marco. Let’s not forget that, yes, it is true that Vance once called Trump America’s Hitler (though he may have meant that as a complement). He’s Massive Musk.

I’ve heard the term nuclear used to describe the feud. This is an apt word since Trump has actual nukes, but he can’t literally launch to liquidate Musk. He is bloviating about hitting him in the wallet by canceling federal contracts, but this would really mess up Pentagon and NASA programs which involve Starlink and SpaceX. He seems to think that announcing he’s getting rid of his own Tesla means more than a hill of beans to anyone.

Musk doesn’t have ICBM’s but he does have billions of dollars. Not only that, he already has the data DOGE stole. He’s making noise about launching, not a missile, but a new political party. If he did this it could siphon off just enough votes to give the Democrats the Congress in the midterm elections. He can pull his DOGE boys out of Washington and use them to figure out ways to take the data on voters and weaponize it so he can use it to target specific voting blocs.

How this ends up being resolved may be determined more by psychology than by politics. He could announce he’s running for president. With the money to flood the media to mount a massive campaign he could do it tomorrow, though perhaps he has already done this. Consider his pinned tweet on X: 

The comments I looked at were mixed. For example:

Note above that whoever made this image got the color of the light saber right. Trump reposted an image of himself with a red Stith light saber and the mockery went viral and led Mark Hamil to blast him for this (see article).

Musk’s experts have the technology to tell how many of the commenters want him to run for president. He likely already knows. At some point if he sees there is a call for him to do this I expect he’ll post a poll.

You can read all 113,000 comments here. Then you can read probably over a million replies to the comments. Let my readers know if you find any interesting ones… 

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If this is, as it seems to be to some extent, a dick measuring contest between powerful men, the battle could go on and on and on. I don’t see either person capitulating.

On MSNBC Jonathan Allen called it a contest to see who’s the biggest dog in the junkyard. It’s an apt metaphor. Both men reside in a junkyard.

It is true Trump has real nukes and this probably makes him feel powerful, but he can't use them. After all, where would he send the ICBM to blow Musk to kingdom come? Trump has Truth Social and Musk has X, and both are adept at slinging slurs and threats that end up all over the news as soon as they go online. They are like ginormous babies screaming at each other.

They are making a lot of noise but does it signfy nothing? They seem to be canceling each other out. What the hell do I know? Maybe history will look at this royal battle as the Fort Sumpter of American political warfare.

Musk has nukes of a kind, not on ICBM’s or cruise missiles, but rather in the form of billions of surplus dollars just waiting to be spent. He CAN use them. 

Wait until Trump discovers what the enfant terrible Musk, with his billions and his X megaphone can do. 

What will happen when one enfant terrible battles to the death with another one?

It is anybody’s guess which baby has the stuff to land a knockout big baby blow.

Who do you think will be victorious?

Update: Regular commenter Robert Bender reminded me (see the comments) that Musk isn’t a natural born citizen and thus could not be president. I thought of some ways around this for him. He could find a surrogate to run in his place, a Mini-Musk. Or he could run and if he won let the Supreme Court deal with it. The Constitution says "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." By then they may be fed up with Trump and want t rule in Musk's favor. I can't find anything that says being from S. Africa he can run for president, just that he's not eligible to BE president.

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AI images in my Substacks are generated by Perchance.

Related: This is best article title about the Musk Trump battle:

Here’s an excerpt from The NY Times Maureen Dowd article (subscription).

Sometimes you’re better off letting the children fight.

That was President Trump’s callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump’s social media spat with Elon Musk. It’s hard to think of two puer aeterni (I had to look that up here) who are more deserving of a verbal walloping.

Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated (I also had to look this up here) on their dueling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.

In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought an over-$80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he’s going to sell it.

Thursday was the most titillating day here since the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy the Earth.

These are Maureen Dowd quotes posted on BlueSky:

• Can’t We All Just Get Along? After Donnie tried to start a race war on behalf of Jburg bad boy Elon, the tiff between the Twitter and Truth Social titans feels more Rodney Dangerfield than Rodney King

• DOGE Day Afternoon Elon's done more blow than Scarface, but the Don just kicked him to the curb like Fredo. Maybe now this space Serpico can go back to cruising for baby mamas without ever learning the scent of a woman. by Maureen Dowd

• Reservoir DOGE Once upon a time in Washington, Mr. Orange and Nice Guy Elon teamed up for the heist of the century. But now they're cutting off each others' ears and I feel like we're stuck in the middle of a gory Tarantino flick.

• Out of Africa Elon and Don were our Redford and Streep, but now they're fighting like Kramer vs. Kramer and thinking about the way they were. Will Don make the indecent proposal of deportation back to Joburg or will the Musk devil wear (dark) MAGA again? It's complicated.

• Eat Pray DOGE Elon may be putting away too much gelato but he and Don made the cutest couple since Notting Hill. Will his runaway pride earn him a ticket to CECOT or just send him looking for pretty women in his DMs on Twitter?

• All My Exes Live in Texas Donald Trump is more George Wallace than George Strait, but his love without end, amen with Elon has unwound. Musk's back in his Austin compound but, I cross my heart when I say if he doesn't run to Amarillo by morning, it might be The Chair for him.

• He Likes Big Cuts And He Cannot Lie, But Elon Told Trump Momma's Gonna Knock You Out, And Trump Said Stop, Hammertime! White Boys Can't Pump n Dump, You're Going On Ice Ice Baby, Elon Said Hey Ya! Theres Some Whores In Your House, I Hear Your Legacy is A Minorrrr 

• Mean Girls AOC said the girls are fighting. Are we sure she’s not jealous that she’s not part of the Plastics?

Reading these I wonder why I even try to be clever….

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What''s the deal with Trump wanting the Panama Canal back and Canada to be a state. It's all about his being threatened by the President Musk meme. By Hal M.Brown

How long before Trump starts wearing the MAGA Panama hat? I want bragging rights for predicting this if he does.

President Theodore Roosevelt wore a Panama hat when he visited the Panama Canal. Will Turmp wear his own version when he goes there if he can take it back? My hunch is that Trump felt he needed an issue to change the subject from people saying Musk was really the president. Maybe we'll see Trump wearing a MAGA Panama hat.

Just as I was starting to write this Jonathan LeMire said this on MSNBC - "when the Time Magazine cover drops" about a Time cover about Elon being president. I was going to write that I really hope they have a snarky cover showing President Musk. Trump pays attention to Time Magazine covers! I made this to post on X using the X logo to cover Trump's face.

I don't follow X having moved to BlueSky (here) but being able to do things like this is the only reason I use it.

Back to the Panama Canal story...

Trump's bringing this up pretty much out of nowhere except the convoluted recesses of his warped mind demonstrates that even though he is about to be sworn in as president he is still deeply insecure. The bloviating macho man has always had an Achille's Heel and it is having a superior macho man take the limelight away from him.

Another Trump weakness is having a woman make the news like Stormy Daniels did by mocking his masculinity and E. Jean Carroll did by forcing him to endure day after day in court. I think that every minute he spent in court he was seething inside and was plotting his revenge.

People make fun of Trump's dancing and although I haven't seen Musk dance at a Trump rally, he does dance in his own energetic odd way. Here's a video

He also can enthusiatically leap quite high, apparently, as shown below, not pleasing Trump.

Musk often wears his black Colonize Mars t-shirt and in this photo he looks like he could be using levitating powers to actually start the journey.

As far as who the real macho man is, Musk is the richest man in the world. Trump is rich and just got back on the Forbes 400 list, but he's nowhere near as rich as Musk who is worth 10 times as much as he is. As far as another common, albeit phallocentric, measure of masculine prowess, Musk has 12 children. Critics question whether Trump and Melania even share a bedroom. Musk just had a baby.

Trump wants to round up undocumented people who want to live here and be productive members of our society.  He wants to depict them as evil so he can be say he vanquished them and saved innocent true Americans from being victims of horrific crimes. Musk wants the immigration problem to be resolved but his focues is on how much it costs.

Musk wants to be known for DOGE and saving the goverment and Americans billions, but he also is passionate about sending people to inhabit another planet. Instead of wanting to be known for helping to cure cancer he tried to cut funding for children's cancer research. Wanting to rocket off to Mars just isn't as glamorous and manly an accomplishment as curing cancer. This is why you won't see Trump making this an focus of his presidency.

Trump has made many promises he is unlikely to be able to keep. People are not particulary patient. They want to see lower grocery prices as soon as he takes office. Trump has to make good on his Hitlerian rhetoric about rounding up immigrants and deporting them. He wants this to happen overnight. Of course it won't and the endeavor which will be marked by ineptitude will be met with a lot of blowback and bad publicity. Trump is setting himself up for failure. So what does he do? He decides to take the Panama Canal back.

On top of this he has also once again brought up the idea of buying Greenland.

There is something so utterly self-defeating about Trump interjecting Panama and Greenland into the news coverage that I can only clincally explain it by positing that the viral President Musk meme has hit his Achille's Heel and hobbled him so he is totally off balance. He is desperate for a diversion. He want to show how powerful he is. He's decided that one way to do this is to pull a Putin. He wants to annex land, in this case a canal, and Greenland, and even the entire country of Canada making it our 51st state. 

He tried unsuccessfully to antagonize Prime Minister of Canada so perhaps this is why he took on the president of Panama. He's trying to sell this idea on Truth Social:

I can't keep up with the images about President Musk that I see posted in social media. Below are just a few of them.

These are mine:

I doubt very much that Trump sees any of these. I admit I enjoy making them and in all modesty think his wearing the "I'm the boss" t-shirt is one of the best I used AI to create. 

To say it is all over the news is an understatement. Consider this simple Google News search for President Musk.

Click above to enlarge image

Trump is that he's the most transparently self-revealing president in my lifetime. This sounds like a complement considering that he has also lied more than any president or presidential candidate this needs some explanation. Most of his lies reveal something about the inner workings of his mind. This goes for many of the words he types on social media and utters when he goes off the teleprompter when he speaks. 

There was a time when mental health professionals were criticized for trying to diagnose Trump without assessing him in person. By now I hope those who lambasted us realize that we have so much information about his psychopathogy it would be a kind of malpractice not to diagnose him. 

Trump is a malignant narcissist who is a dangerous to our democracy. In addtion he meets every critera for being an examplar for the Dark Triad.

Trump, who lacks a semblence of empathy, has a sadistic streak. So do others like Stephen Miller and his choice to head the immigration round up Tom Homan. Like with Trump, the cruelty is the point. Being cruel makes them feel tough and manly.

Related:

Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski on plot to take Greenland: 'We have not expanded our country in 70 years'

"Corey, what do you make of Trump's threat about the Panama Canal?" Newsmax host Logan Ratick asked the Trump adviser.

"Yeah, once again, this is President Trump focused on America first," Lewandowski explained. "We sold it for a dollar, which was just the most ridiculous thing that anybody has ever seen."

"And so it's time to make sure that our independence and our dominance on the world stage is back in play," he continued. "He's talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn't have its influence there."

"This is a president who is making outside-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that, once again, the United States is the dominant world superpower."

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