Elon musk

Trump’s tariff threat

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat of 25 percent, across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada has already shocked the system. The US dollar rose against its neighbors’ currencies, as stocks dropped and rose.Floating an additional tariff on China is one thing, but adding America’s two neighbors makes the move especially ambitious. If implemented, the US would effectively levy tariffs against its top three trading partners, which together make up around 40 to 50 percent of total trade between America and the world. That’s revolutionary.One thing that’s for certain is that tariffs would hurt the countries they target more than they hurt the US. More than 75 percent of Mexican and Canadian exports are to the Land of the Free.

How DOGE is planning to cut down the feds

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

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What Trump’s appointments tell us

Donald Trump may have a four-year term, but he has far less time to make a real difference. In practice, he may have a year or perhaps eighteen months before the midterm election looms and Congress slows to a crawl. If Trump wants to be a transformational president — and he clearly does — then he will have to move fast. That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s beginning with a series of rapid-fire appointments, most of which require approval from the new, Republican-majority Senate. (His White House aides, such as national security advisor, do not require Senate approval.) What message is Trump sending with his appointments so far? First, he demands loyalty — to him and to the agenda he articulated clearly on the campaign trail.

Democracy on the ballot

Democracy won, apparently. More than 73 million people voted for Donald J. Trump, who won 312 Electoral College votes and the popular vote, making him the 45th and 47th president of the United States. In the end, it wasn’t particularly close, and the exit polls from the night paint a pretty bleak picture for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. By now, you will have read most of the breakdowns — she lost ground with Hispanics, whites, blacks, married people, non-college-educated people, et cetera. In fact, the only demographic group that she gained ground with was college-educated white women — she even somehow managed to lose ground from 2016 and 2020 with black women, a stunning and impressive feat. Tim Walz lost his home district in deep-blue Minnesota.

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The three reasons Trump won

Bishop Butler once observed that probability is “the very guide of life.” This is true. It follows that possibility is cheap, an errant muse. Yes, we must stash away in the back of our mind the admonition that “in this life... we must always distinguish between the Unlikely and the Impossible” (that’s the philosopher R. Psmith, courtesy of P.G. Wodehouse). Nevertheless, we should not run our lives or write our columns on that basis.   “Why Trump won.” That is my assignment. I shall treat it as a declaration, not a question. And even though I write before the returns are in, I can give you the reasons. After all, I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win “in a landslide” at least since July.

Thune rises to the top

It took John Thune just two ballots to get the job of the new majority leader of the Senate, replacing Mitch McConnell after eighteen years of rule. Attempts to challenge him by John Cornyn and Rick Scott fell short, with the final tally of the secret ballot (where just about everyone knows how everyone else is voting) led to a 29-24 vote victory.  The South Dakotan is a longtime member of the Republican establishment, originally recruited by the George W. Bush team to challenge the supposedly unbeatable Tom Daschle, the Democratic minority leader at the time, in what became the most expensive campaign of 2004.

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Trump’s White House… reloaded

President-elect Donald Trump is slowly revealing who will — and who will not — be a part of his second administration come 2025. As a reminder, last week Trump announced campaign co-manager Susie Wiles as his chief-of-staff.Over the weekend, Trump rebuffed Nikki Haley, who previously served as Trump’s UN ambassador, and Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s secretary of state. “I will not be inviting former ambassador Nikki Haley, or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.

The top election takeaways from Trump’s beatdown

President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States after a historic political comeback and complete annihilation of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called Trump to concede this afternoon after failing to appear at the campaign’s planned victory party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, DC. Instead, she delivered her concession speech there this afternoon. More on that below the fold. Biden is also said to have called Trump to congratulate him and express his desire for a smooth transition. It was a relatively short night compared to most predictions, with Trump sealing victory a couple of hours after midnight (although the result seemed obvious by that point).

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The winners and losers of the 2024 election

Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding.  Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.

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Trump hails new ‘golden age’ in Palm Beach victory speech

At just before 2:30 a.m. ET, President-elect Donald Trump took the stage in West Palm Beach to declare victory as the 47th president of the United States. "This will truly be the golden age of America," Trump said. "It will make America great again. There was no other path to victory. We will make you proud of your vote." After thanking his family, his youngest son Barron towering over him and Melania, he went through a litany of shoutouts and thank-yous to his inner circle, including Elon Musk, who he praised as "a genius we must protect" after giving a detailed rundown watching a SpaceX rocket land after a launch; and Dana White, who he invited to the stage to offer thanks to a roster of podcasters including Theo Von and the Nelk Boys.

Joe Rogan endorses Trump after eleventh-hour Elon Musk interview

Donald Trump’s podcast bonanza just paid off with the biggest win possible: a formal endorsement from Joe Rogan, whose massive audience has been coveted by both Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the election. In Rogan’s latest episode, with top Trump surrogate and X CEO Elon Musk, the two talked for almost three hours in Rogan’s Austin studio — standard fare for his show, which was apparently too much for the sitting vice president, whose team would only agree to an hour-long interview on the road, which never occurred. But the most important takeaway came when Rogan posted the episode, along with his commentary. “If it wasn't for [Musk] we'd be fucked,” Rogan wrote.

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The 2024 election edition

Welcome, DC Diary readers, to the last edition of this newsletter before Tuesday night’s election. Most polls still have the presidential race at a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Pennsylvania remains the lynchpin, as the paths for the respective candidates appears to be the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania for Harris, and the Sun Belt and Pennsylvania for Trump. Each campaign is pointing to data that they think gives them an advantage tomorrow.Trump’s team published a memo Monday, for example, pointing out that early vote numbers suggest turnout among urban voters and women is down significantly in the seven swing states compared to 2020.

Trump is Team MAGA’s last chance

Elon Musk has often commented that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.” He often adds that, “far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it.” I believe both statements are essentially true. I say “essentially” because, should Trump lose — or to follow Musk more accurately, should he not be elected, which is not quite the same thing as losing — then there would still be events called elections. Only they wouldn’t be like elections of yore.  According to the Constitution (another thing that would retired should Trump fail to be elected), the qualifications to be president of the United States are pretty minimal.

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No matter who wins, you lose

For some of us, watching newly minted Republican tech bros giddy at the thought of a Trump win fills us with a painful nostalgia. There’s a sadness but also a burgeoning frustration while reading their posts. A friend recently pointed out that my social media posts seemed “cynical.” Another called to ask if I was OK after I exclaimed, half joking, for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. These friends underestimate the severity of the political blackpill some of us have swallowed. We’re angry — yes! We’re angry because those who promoted all the bullshit — all the diversity, equity and inclusion, all the “woke narratives,” all the infantile socialism, all the petitions to the establishment — are not sorry enough. Many do not even acknowledge their role.

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A serene Steve Bannon says his stint in the slammer was ‘empowering’

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and host of the War Room podcast, was released from FCI Danbury, the federal prison where he was incarcerated as a political prisoner for the last four months Tuesday. His tort? The same thing that Eric Holder and Merrick Garland were guilty of: refusing to respond to a Congressional subpoena. Neither Holder nor Garland were indicted or incarcerated, of course, because neither supports Donald Trump.   That was Bannon’s real outrage: supporting the man whom Kamala Harris describes as “literally Hitler” and a “fascist” and whose supporters Joe Biden just described as “garbage.

House report blasts Secret Service failures

A bipartisan House task force released an initial report detailing the calamitous security failures preceding the first failed assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump earlier this year. The failures are “stunning,” one of the staffers involved with its drafting told The Spectator. “Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the report says.Those who worked on the report noted to The Spectator that the failures that allowed a would-be presidential assassin to nearly kill Trump on live television and fatally shoot Corey Comperatore predated the Butler rally by days.

How Elon Musk changed the world

Technological revolutions can only change the world when the new technology becomes cheap enough for it to be widely applied. Just ask Elon Musk. The rocket age began with Germany’s V-2 in 1944, but the single-use technology was so expensive that it required state resources to utilize. Then, last Sunday, SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster, the most powerful ever launched, returned from space and was secured by its gantry for reuse. Thus it became, in the words of the New York Times, “more like a jetliner than a rocket.” It is estimated that reusable rockets will reduce the cost per pound of launching things into space by at least an order of magnitude and a new space age can now begin.

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Kamala enters the Fox den

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Tesla’s Cybercab promises a better future — for Elon Musk

Each year, more than 40,000 people die in car accidents — and most of them are caused by user error. Set aside drunk driving and texting and live-streaming while driving a McLaren in the rain; even in normal conditions, humans are just not, fundamentally, great drivers. So imagine a future without that; where death by car accident is a freak occurrence and driving is handled by expert computers instead. We don’t use elevator operators anymore and are glad for it — and autopilot systems have long made flights safer. Why not let computers drive us too? True “Level 4” autonomous cars wouldn’t just make commutes more pleasant, letting you read or sleep as your car takes you to work, but save many, many lives. I believe in that future.

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Trump returns to site of first assassination attempt

President Donald Trump triumphantly returned to Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday — exactly twelve weeks after an attempted assassin shot Trump in the ear, killed a rally attendee, Corey Comperatore, and injured several others.Trump previously promised he would go back to finish his rally in Butler, and he did indeed show up at the same spot where he was very nearly killed, kicking off the event with an acknowledgment that the last time he was there, his speech was cut short. “As I was saying...” Trump said to cheers and laughter. He referenced the famous illegal immigration chart that likely saved his life, as he turned his head to look at it at the exact moment the shooter fired, ensuring the bullet grazed his ear and did not go through his head. “I love that chart.