From “The Buck Stops Here” to “Blame The Little Guy”
Elon Musk, the richest man ever to owe most of his fortune to government handouts and regulatory favors awarded to him to perform services utterly unjustified by the principles of limited government he now pretends to espouse, is trying to justify his random none-of-this-will-ever-affect-anyone-I-know torching of the federal bureaucracy in exactly the Trumpian way one would expect from an unprincipled businessman without a shred of moral decency or gentlemanly integrity, namely by publicly demeaning the people whose lives and livelihoods he is thuggishly destroying. Specifically — and I report this as though it were the behavior of a leading player in a presidential administration, even though it is more in keeping with that of the boy I knew in elementary school who stole the wig off the head of a little girl who was hairless due to a health condition, presumably chemotherapy, and then ran around the schoolyard with it, laughing at her — the dopeheaded dimwit recently retweeted someone’s comment that “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”
Par for the course with the Trump cult and its leader. Just as Trump himself along with his sidekick J. D. Vance ambushed Volodymyr Zelensky on live television in the Oval Office, as though smearing the leader of a friendly country as a war-profiteering ingrate, while openly sympathizing with the tyrant who is invading that leader’s country, were the proper tone to take in the process of shifting American policy away from “unnecessary” involvement in foreign conflicts, so Musk apparently feels it is appropriate to blame ordinary office workers for the world-historical crimes of the three most bloodthirsty killers of the twentieth century, thereby implying that the public workers being summarily fired in droves by Musk’s new-fangled Office of Doped-Up Chainsaw Massacres are somehow aligned, in spirit or motivation, with the murders of a hundred million innocent people.
Needless to say, Musk’s team is itself made up of…public sector workers. And these particular public sector workers are, so it seems, actually aligned with the spirit and motivations of the crimes and criminals that Musk’s retweet is citing, inasmuch as his government minions, like their ever-teen master, are indeed operating on the premise that their victims are not only unworthy of empathy and dignified dismissal, but rather deserve to be publicly chastised and reviled by their torturers, even while their lives are being wantonly overturned by a billionaire kook from a silver spoon birth who lacks even the imagination to conceive of what suddenly losing one’s career employment might mean to a middle class person with a family to support and bills to pay. And it occurs to me to ask whether, when the damage of Musk’s reign of terror has been tallied, he will assume this same cowardly stance — “Don’t blame me, I didn’t cause this mess; it was my public sector workers.”
But isn’t it just like Musk, not to mention like Trump, Vance, Rubio, and the rest of this mob, to flagrantly reject the essential principle of American presidential politics for generations, made explicit by Harry Truman though implied by all the rest, namely “The buck stops here”? How convenient to pretend that leaders are not ultimately responsible for the choices they make or the goals they set. After all, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t personally kill those millions now, did they? Actually, boys and girls, they did. That is what government means. It is what agency means. It is what responsibility means. And it is, of course, a concept far too abstract and rational for the likes of Elon, Donald, J. D., and little wee Marco. Which is reason number thirty-seven why none of those four “men” ought ever to have been allowed within a thousand miles of political power.
Meanwhile, Trump is dropping open and heavy hints about using the military to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, simply because he thinks they ought to be under American control. And the apologists, which is my very generous euphemism for snivelling coward idol-worshippers, will say, “He’s just winding up the media.” Is he? And is that what a president should be concerned with? And would you, if you were trying to agitate a perceived critic or rival, do it by repeatedly threatening to burn down your neighbor’s garage or to build a new fence enveloping his backyard as your property? There is another camp of apologists, of course, who actually think Trump’s claims against neighboring nations (including Canada and Denmark) are reasonable proposals expressing legitimate national interests. These are the people for whom Trump’s protection-racket demands for Ukrainian minerals as a condition for not abandoning that country to mass rape and murder sound like “a great deal for everyone.” They are also the ones most likely to revel in Musk’s adoption of the position that American public sector workers deserve no more respect as humans than Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.
