Trump and Musk Flounder

The distraction duo is in full swing and floundering.

Donald Trump is saying he will nominate his new soulmate, Elon Musk, to lead a government efficiency commission if the former president is elected in November.

I’m sure the Silicon Valley contingent is happy with the news as well as Wall Street and Twitter fans of Musk, who has become a leading right-wing voice on the online platform he renamed X. Hold off on throwing any MAGA caps in the air, though.

photo by Kristina Flour

The announcement demonstrates something more sinister: Both men excel at floating attention-grabbing stories in the media to distract the public from other more serious problems they would rather not discuss.

Trump’s troubles involve the burden of deflecting attention from the wobbly footings of his White House campaign. He’s now the old guy in the race, pining for the days he was running against Joe Biden. The last thing he wants is for anyone to focus on the same signs of cognitive decline that drove Biden to drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, his Vice President and the younger candidate in the race.

Trump has had problems with signs of aging in this campaign -- the rambling speeches, getting the names of foreign leaders wrong, and various other lapses. Biden’s more severe signs of cognitive decline overshadowed Trump’s equally problematic lapses, though. Just as important is the media’s tendency to launder Trump’s rambling remarks by translating them into language that seems rational and coherent for its audience. Correcting grammar and making policies readable is the media’s job. That’s understandable. But news organizations duck their responsibilities when they ignore language and habits that could signal deeper troubles for the oldest candidate in the race.  

A glaring example of the faulty coverage occurred the other day when the former president spoke to a friendly audience at the New York Economic Club.

“Former President Donald Trump,” the Associated Press dutifully reported, “suggested to business leaders Thursday that his plans to increase tariffs on imports would solve seemingly unrelated challenges such as the rising cost of childcare in the U.S.”

Similar reports flowed from other major news sources who covered Trump’s speech. All sounded like summaries of a rational policy statement by Trump. But Trump’s actual response to a pointed question about his policies on childcare was disturbingly incoherent, which is trending. In case you missed it, here's the transcript of Trump’s response to a question about what legislation would he offer, if elected, to make the soaring cost of childcare more affordable.

“Well, I would do that,” Trump said, “and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that. It’s a very important issue but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about because, look, childcare is childcare. It couldn’t, you know, there’s something to have to have in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about including childcare that’s going to take care we’re going to have. I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers I’m talking about including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of our country first. This is about America first and it’s about making America great again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, So, we’ll take care of it. Thank you, very good question, thank you. “

Had President Biden given such a response to a similar question just weeks ago, the media would have been demanding his latest neurological exam. There were no reports of alarm about Trump’s remarks, though. Trump’s age and his obvious instances of cognitive decline simply remain an under-covered issue that demands more public scrutiny.

Trump is a master at diverting attention from uneasy moments or speeches that can be long, rambling, or uncomfortable. In the same talk to New York’s financial elites, he floated the news that he intended to appoint Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency commission that Musk had previously suggested. Musk responded to a tweet about a Washington Post report on the proposed role, saying he “can’t wait” and that there is “a lot of waste and needless government regulation that has to go.”

I’m not saying the two men hatched a conspiracy. Trump’s suggestion and Musk’s response merely distracted the public and the press from Trump’s incoherence and produced the kind of headlines that both men love: The world’s richest man will audit the overbearing regulatory reach of an out-of-control federal government. It is a move that draws cheers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Make no mistake, though, they both had an interest in steering the public away from controversies they would rather avoid. Musk matches Trump’s troubles with some problems of his own, mainly his lackluster leadership of Twitter, which has lost about seventy percent of its value since Musk acquired it for $44 billion in October 2022 and renamed it X.

Under Musk’s leadership, X has suffered a huge loss of advertisers uncomfortable with Musk’s capricious approach to content moderation on the site. The number of monthly users dropped by fifteen percent in the first year since Musk took over, and advertising dropped by twenty-four percent, leaving Musk and his investors with paper losses of $24 billion. Musk’s chummy ties to the former president also hurt X’s credibility as a source of news.  

Making matters worse: The guy who is slated to streamline our government is overextended, creating problems at the company that made him famous, Tesla, where he remains CEO. Under his leadership, the company’s stock has fluctuated wildly in the markets and now stands at $213 a share, down nearly 50 percent from its all-time high of $409.97 in 2022. The ups and downs of the stock has unnerved many investors. In the spirit of full disclosure, I dumped some Telsa stock I owned months ago because I lost faith in the leadership of the company.

More significantly, Tesla is resting on its’ laurels while Musk fiddles with X, and the company’s competitors are designing much better electric cars, often at better prices. Excluding the company’s Cybertruck, which experienced multiple high-profile delays, Tesla has not produced a new model since the Model-Y in 2020. I’ve owned four Teslas, including a Model Y and a Model 3, cars I now drive. I was an early adopter at Tesla and admire Musk’s spirit of innovation.

Trump’s announcement about Musk got the intended effect: Knee-jerk coverage that eclipses questions about signs of age or disorientation. The episode characterizes how the White House race is being covered.

Some journalists are speaking out, saying traditional coverage once deemed acceptable has to change.

“When people are able to watch or hear events and speeches themselves,” Melanie Sill, a former top editor and news executive at major newspapers and a public radio station in California, wrote on LinkedIn. “I can see what some major news outlets are not covering, or how incomplete / inaccurate reports are. But most of us don't have time to hunt down and report for ourselves. We need news we can trust to provide an accurate, fair picture of what is said and done.”

Mike Barnicle, a former columnist for the Boston Globe and several other news outlets, put it more bluntly on the Morning Joe news show. “We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency,” Barnicle said.

“How did we get here?” Barnicle asked. Then he pointed a finger at his media colleagues. “Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say, about submarines, and sharks, and electric batteries,” Barnicle said. He noted that such things are “not really covered” as a window into “who the man is” or a sign that he’s “out of his mind.”

“The judgment that Trump is “out of his mind” might strike some newsroom denizens as loaded, opinionated language,” says Greg Sargent, a staff writer at The New Republic. “And surely some of them would reject Barnicle’s critique by noting that they do often cover Trump’s wild-eyed utterances.

“But we should pause to appreciate Barnicle’s deeper, underlying point here,” Sargent writes, “it’s that merely covering each of Trump’s hallucinatory claims as news items, even if that includes aggressively fact-checking them, doesn’t do justice to the much bigger story that’s unfolding right at the end of all of our noses.”

Sargent says the media should focus on the obvious: “Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.”

The same goes for Musk. Voters deserve headlines that define rather than distract.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.