How Trump and Musk built their own reality

The putative president of the United States, Donald Trump, stood on the White House lawn. In his hand, he held a sales pitch for Tesla cars. The most powerful man in America, Elon Musk, attired for a very casual funeral and looking miserable, stood next to Trump. As Trump spoke, promising to buy a Tesla, Musk stood with his arms folded over his chest, giving the undeniable impression of a sulking toddler. Later, Trump threatened to label anyone vandalizing Teslas or Tesla dealerships domestic terrorists.

The entire incident was, in its way, revelatory. A series of protests had targeted Tesla dealerships and owners, as Americans expressed their distaste for Musk, the unelected leader of the US. The instinct, in response to real behavior, was to create a media moment: a Tesla ad.

One of the bizarre hallmarks of the Trump era is a set of elected officials who increasingly cannot tell apart spectacle and reality — as well as a group of voters who seem similarly confused. Take the Trump voter insisting that government agencies get tax cuts for DEI initiatives, as a baffled Sam Seder attempts to explain that, in fact, government agencies are what taxes are for, and thus are not taxed themselves. It seems the conservative mind cannot comprehend that DEI is, in fact, actually popular. To avoid acknowledging that, the voter summoned up a conspiracy theory that flies in the basic facts of governance, which he either does not know or does not care about. Confronted with a choice between a truth he doesn’t like and a fantasy, he has chosen the fantasy.

The break with reality has been a long time coming — QAnon and Pizzagate preceded it — but in the pre-pandemic era, it was largely the fringes of the conservative movement. Now it is the main event. Faced with the horrors of mass death in 2020, a great many people have since apparently chosen to make a break with reality. That is now the basis of the conservative movement, as Mark Zuckerberg tacitly acknowledged when he abandoned fact-checking on Meta platforms. Requiring Trump supporters to stick to truth on social media would mean they could not post.

And what has replaced truth? Spectacle.

The proclivity for spectacle is the thing Musk and Trump truly have in common, though the media they target is different: Musk is an online guy, and Trump was forged in reality TV. Trump’s media instincts hew closer to professional wrestling — he has hosted two WrestleManias — and he appears to approach his cabinet as a kind of casting for Fox News. Is noted drunkard Pete Hegseth good at his job? Who cares, he looks good on television. Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, originated on The Real World, after all.

Musk has similarly created an online profile of himself, largely as a marketing gimmick for Tesla. (Hey, did you hear that Robert Downey Jr modeled his portrayal of Tony Stark on Elon Musk?) In less dire times, he posted about mixing wine and Ambien as readily as he did about SpaceX missions — creating a fandom in the process. He is optimized for the attention economy; Musk may be outrageous, he may be insulting, he may be juvenile, but he is not boring. I am one of many journalists who had to follow his entire charade of taking Tesla private — which played out on Twitter, rather than in any boardroom.

The spectacle works because pseudo-events are more exciting than reality; a normal budgetary meeting is a snooze, and normal diplomatic relations rely on closed doors, occurring out of sight of the average voter. Reality TV doesn’t work on this level — and keeping the viewers hooked is the main source of Trump’s and Musk’s respective power.

The question is how long the spell will last. Is it possible for reality to be more interesting than the spectacle? Is there a point at which the horrors stop being entertainment?

One of the basic problems of the modern world, and of mass media, is that most news events occur at a distance to a normal person and appear only through representation. The Tesla protests, for example, occur on TV or on TikTok for most people, side by side with fiction, and given equal epistemic weight. TV news itself allowed its seriousness to erode beginning in the 1970s, chasing ratings through entertainment.

The main innovation of Fox News, besides its propagandistic tendencies, was Roger Ailes’ focus on making sure the channel was titillating rather than useful. (Ailes’ formula included a “leg cam” and plenty of blondes.) Fox News — the “news” part is best thought of as a dark joke — is a ratings bonanza because its primary focus is entertainment. The formula is adapted for television but is roughly the same as that detailed by David Foster Wallace’s 2005 profile of right-wing talk radio “Host”: keep the audience enraged, keep the audience engaged.

This runs parallel to reality TV, which is not especially reality-based. Trump jumped to Fox News from The Apprentice and WWE with his instincts for keeping an audience fully formed. His first term was marked by a preoccupation with ratings — not approval, but television. Trump has long had a propensity to call into his favorite Fox News shows to ramble away — and his schedule during his first term was crammed full of “executive time,” which one might presume was his TV habit.

This focus on TV hasn’t changed. Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended with Trump telling Zelenskyy, “This is going to be great television.” Great television, of course, is not the same as great statecraft, and as a result of the meeting, European leaders pledged support for Ukraine. Trump is obsessed with invading Canada, and it appears to be because he doesn’t like seeing a wayward line on a map. This saber-rattling has got our mild-mannered northern neighbors boycotting US products. The maker of Jack Daniel’s says that Canada pulling US alcohol from store shelves to express their displeasure is “worse than tariffs.”

Previous US leaders — starting with President John F. Kennedy — have also skillfully commanded television as a medium to suit their political ends. But those leaders seemed aware of the distinction between television and reality. For Trump, reality is whatever he says it is, which is then broadcast by Fox News back to him to confirm its truth. In his last term, even as Trump himself was sickened by the novel coronavirus, he insisted the pandemic was no big deal. After being taken by helicopter to a hospital, he made a series of public appearances where he was obviously ill and pretending not to be. Almost 400,000 people died from covid that year, according to death certificate information compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This may be the only way of explaining the bizarre economic policy coming from the White House. I don’t think Trump understands money — he’s filed for bankruptcy six times, hardly the sign of a successful businessman. But thanks to The Apprentice, he knows how to play a successful businessman on TV — by appearing domineering and decisive.

The economy, however, occurs in reality rather than on TV, and in just 20 days of Trump’s flailing, the stock market has gone from all-time highs to an atmosphere of pure fear. The tariff threats, which Trump thinks make him sound powerful, are part of the problem, alienating trading partners and jacking up the price of ordinary goods. So, too, are Musk’s random firings of government workers under the guise of “efficiency.” Federal spending cuts also threaten everyone from farmers to retirees. Four airlines have cut their forecasts because they fear consumer confidence is waning.

Sure, some of the economy — the stock market in particular, about which, more in a minute — can be shaped by narrative. The problem is a conflict of interest: the things that Trump thinks make him look strong to his voters also make the business community skittish. Consider his tariffs. They target some of America’s biggest imports and stand to make it harder to get your car repaired, assuming you can buy one at all. If the stock market continues to plunge, it’ll hit baby boomers squarely in their retirement savings, which will mean less spending overall.

So, Trump is destroying the economy so he can look and feel tough — the sign of a man who’s confused about the difference between television and reality.

His main source of funding, Musk, who has signaled he wants to buy more influence, is similarly confused. Musk’s problem isn’t TV, though. It’s the internet.

Musk spent the last 10 years or so as the internet’s premier financial influencer, memeing Tesla’s stock to a bizarrely high price-earnings ratio through his Twitter antics. (Indeed, the platform was so important to him that he eventually bought it.) And while he has enough sense of reality to ransack the federal government in order to benefit SpaceX, meet with foreign leaders, and cut oversight of his companies, he is also striking poses for the benefit of X.

Take, for instance, telling the foreign minister of Poland, “Be quiet, small man” on X. Poland has been paying for Starlink terminals used in Ukraine and has threatened to find another provider. As Trump and Musk blunder around the EU, alienating allies in order to cozy up to Russia, Musk’s Twitter fingers escalate the sense of panic. Not exactly what you want when the EU is considering rearming itself.

Musk’s power is very real. He has control of the US Treasury — because while the courts have repeatedly ruled against him, those court orders need to be enforced to matter, and on several occasions, Musk and his goons have reportedly “vetoed” payments Trump has ordered. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts happen at his whim. That means that Republican officials call Musk directly to grovel.

But they also publicly perform for Musk on X. Take Ed Martin, the US attorney, who has promised an X account claiming to be DOGE-affiliated that he will take action on “doxing.” Or Oklahoma senator James Lankford publicly begging for his pet ammunition plant to be spared DOGE cuts. Even the mothers of Musk’s children resort to X performances to get his attention.

Rather than attempting to reassert their constitutional power and decapitate DOGE, Republicans have chosen to abase themselves. “What we got to do as Republicans is capture their work product, put it in a bill and vote on it,” said Lindsey Graham, the senator from North Carolina, according to CNN. He is the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, which, before Musk, was actually a fairly powerful position. Now it seems his job is to rubber-stamp Musk’s decisions.

Musk’s key obsession appears to be “wokeness,” a smokescreen for dismantling the Civil Rights Movement. The weird conspiracy theories Musk is ingesting on X are guiding his cuts in the government, which have been haphazard and have, at times, resulted in the rehiring of fired employees after officials belatedly realized they were crucial. The cuts, which have not delivered Musk’s promised cost savings, have been justified through lies Musk and DOGE have promoted, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency housing migrants in luxury hotels.

Musk is not so far gone that he can’t raid the government to suit himself. Appealing to the Trump base gives him cover to target agencies that will benefit him directly, such as NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Musk is effectively trying to create his own political reality, using X as a staging ground. The more noxious and viral the claims, the more useful they are to Musk.

He is also attempting to destroy anything that might contract his constructed reality — which explains his war on Wikipedia. Wikipedia, a largely volunteer-run nonprofit, is a remarkably accurate encyclopedia — at least as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and maybe more so. It is a reference source available to anyone. And Musk loathes it. As long as it remains, anyone can check what he says and discover when he is wrong. He has hated that for a very long time.

Despite Musk’s increasingly batshit public performance, which now includes a gesture that looks suspiciously like a Nazi salute, Republicans are too scared to criticize him. They know Musk can fund a primary challenge against them without breaking a sweat. So they’re stuck with Musk, who has been posting increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories to his X account. When X went down earlier this week, Musk claimed with no evidence that Ukraine was behind the company’s outage. Instead, hacking collective Dark Storm has taken credit for the disruption.

Musk has a long history of manipulating attention online — well before his chainsaw antics at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), his jumping jack at a Trump rally, or the alleged Sieg Heil. Twitter, when it was still called that, was how he created a fan base that hung on his every word. For at least the last decade, he’s been creating a reality-distortion field. Sometime around 2018 — I’d pinpoint it at his “pedo guy” defamation trial — Musk stopped being able to distinguish between his performances and reality. As this happened, the amount of time he spent posting on Twitter started to climb.

Once upon a time, there was a business purpose: Twitter meant he didn’t have to do traditional advertising for Tesla; eventually, he built a profile big enough that he could just show up on TV shows like Saturday Night Live, while his competitors had to buy ads. But it seems Musk has become increasingly isolated, since his fame has made it difficult to appear in public. That means Twitter, now X, has been his main social outlet for some time, and it appears to have seriously warped him. At CPAC, when Musk, apparently zooted, mumbled something about “I am become meme,” he really, really meant it.

It is, at times, difficult to know if Musk can distinguish fantasy from reality. Twitter is a far more poisoned well than cable news, and as Musk’s use has increased, his public statements have gotten increasingly weird. Musk has repeatedly suggested that Fort Knox’s gold is gone — never mind that in the last Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visited the gold. Is this just red meat to the base? Does Musk want an excuse to be let into Fort Knox, to visit or even pocket the gold? Or did he read something on the darker recesses of Twitter and take it as truth?

Musk has also claimed that there is wild fraud in Social Security, targeting it for the latest round of DOGE cuts. Musk has said that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” which will doubtless be news to the many retirees who rely on it. Looks like Musk is attempting to create the conditions that would allow him to slash Social Security by inventing fraud wholesale. But it is possible, I suppose, that he is so brainrotted he really believes what he’s saying.

The White House is currently claiming that Musk’s intent to meddle with Social Security won’t affect payments. We’ll see. The guy who’s posting memes calling people who receive it “the parasite class” doesn’t seem like he’s a careful steward of the program. And stiffing Social Security beneficiaries could add to Trump’s economic woes — as, once again, retirees cut spending.

TV and X reproduce events that happen at a distance, which makes it easier for distortions to take hold. If someone tells me it is raining while I am standing in the sun, I know I am being lied to. But if someone tells me that the gold in Fort Knox has been stolen, I cannot check that directly. I have to trust intermediaries — the soldiers who guard the gold, the Treasury auditors who annually count it. As trust in institutions has been eroded, partly through the institutions’ own mistakes, conspiracy theories have run wild.

Conspiracy theories are usually more entertaining than reality — a secret gold heist is so sensational that multiple movies have been made about it — but they also flatter the conspiracist, who now has secret knowledge. The flattering part, the secret knowledge, is what allows conspiracy theorists to continue to believe lies even in the face of actual, verifiable events.

I’m not convinced Trump and Musk are tracking reality anymore, in part because, in reality, they look pretty ugly. Better to imagine themselves as their fans do: bold heroes, fighting for America — rather than gross authoritarians ransacking the country for personal benefit.

As for their supporters, the erratic behavior, tariffs, abrupt firings, and tensions with Canada have some Michigan swing voters expressing reservations. These people are at least aware of economic reality. But right now, true believers in DOGE and Trump feel they are part of a community that is “saving” the US from, uhhhh, woke? Usually, lie-based belief systems are fragile — it’s hard to make the initial dent in the worldview, but once it happens, the whole thing shatters.

The attacks on Tesla threaten Trump and Musk, and might be enough to shake some of their followers loose. They are also, and this is important, entertaining in a way that works against the pair. It is funny to listen to Cybertruck owners whine. It is even funnier to see the Cybertruck get stuck or have parts fall off.

Tesla’s plunging stock price threatens Musk’s business reputation — particularly since he’s supposedly the company’s CEO and yet is spending all of his time in the White House, securing fun new payouts for SpaceX. It also threatens his spending power, since most of Musk’s net worth is tied up in Tesla stock.

Worse, a lot of that stock is pledged as collateral for loans. As of a 2024 SEC filing, about a third of Musk’s Tesla shares were pledged. If Tesla’s share price falls low enough, Musk has to pony up more shares or pay back some of his loans, which leaves him with less spending money for Trump and the Republicans. That loosens some of his grip on power. No wonder he’s panicking. The little demonstration on the White House lawn shows how much power Musk still has over Trump — because if Trump wanted to apply pressure to Musk, he wouldn’t make a public show of support.

You can see, if you squint, what’s happening. Trump and Musk are trying to reframe the protest against Tesla dealerships (and indeed, Teslas themselves) as the “woke mob” — substituting into the roles that “antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” played in Trump’s last presidency. Footage of people protesting Tesla and leaving bags of dog shit on Cybertrucks can create a new enemy for Musk and Trump’s enemies to hate, letting them dodge anger for their actions that harm the economy and Social Security.

The question is whether it’ll work.

Cuts to Social Security and Medicaid have the potential to be dangerous to Musk — and therefore also to Trump. Both programs are popular, even with Republicans. Musk says he’s going to cut $700 billion, which may mean putting up new hurdles for people to receive their benefits — requiring more paperwork, say. Or it may mean cutting payments to doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. Either way, it’ll hit people who rely on both programs pretty quickly, as they are increasingly unable to access care. And it’s hard to blame that on former President Joe Biden when Musk is out here already taking credit for it.

If grandma suddenly can’t see her doctor, we all know who’s to blame — Elon Musk, and the guy who put him in office, Donald Trump. I’m not sure any amount of “woke mob” posturing can undo that.