Friends Forever

Increasingly malevolent emperor Donald Trump and Boer piss baby Elon Musk spent much of last week doing what they both love best: posting. If you want to know what they were fighting about, Garbage Ryan recapped it in just the right amount of detail (i.e. some, but not too much).

But if you want to know why they were fighting, it’s because they’re the same guy. They’re both con men who rely on an exaggerated reputation for wealth—Trump by inflated real estate values and Musk by inflated Tesla stock. They’re both vacuous dullards convinced of their own intellectual superiority. They’re both the disappointing sons of abusive fathers. Neither ever learned the basic truth that other people really exist, and both have consequently spent their lives chained up in a Plato’s cave of their own making, miserably reënacting vengeance on the shadows because no amount of money or power or attention will ever make up for the fact that daddy didn’t love them. The main difference between the two lies in which generation of their progenitors was openly white supremacist—Trump’s Klan father versus Musk’s apartheid grandfather.

And as everyone but K. Daniel always knew, there can only be one of That Guy. Personally I think there should be zero, but Trump and Musk both agree with the rest of us that there can only be, at most, one. So if you put your money down on anyone but the current executive of the global imperium to win this donnybrook, well, I regret to inform you.

Today the Wall St. Journal’s Becky Peterson reports that Tesla “sold fewer than 40,000 Cybertrucks [in the U.S.] in 2024—well below Musk’s ultimate goal of 250,000 a year,” and that the company is on track to sell very nearly 29,000 more this year. Maybe. This is the flagship vehicle of the world’s eleventh largest company by market cap, and Kia has already beaten its 2025 projected annual sales with the K5 sedan, a car I have never heard of and which, for those of you who remember my old website, I swear I’m not making up. Tesla is a company worth, allegedly, almost a trillion dollars. Most of Musk’s net worth is the result of multiplying Tesla’s stock price by the large number of shares he owes to various lenders, and the rest represents his ownership stake in SpaceX, a company desperately trying to firehose enough internet satellites into low earth orbit to continue to exist when the U.S. government figures out that it’s been had. It’s not looking great for the world’s most famous dope addled sperm donor.

I feel bad for our country, but the Trump/Musk falling out created a brief but welcome shower of content in a years-long drought of fun things to blog about. Everyone got a hand on the ball, including Liz Lopatto; Miles Klee; Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Natalie Andrews; Charlie Warzel; Nikki McCann Ramirez and Asawin Suebsaeng; Ben Smith; Moira Donegan; Arwa Mahdawi; Josh Marshall; probably you, if you’re still reading this list; and now I suppose also me. Senator Chris Murphy told the audience to settle down, as is the Democrats’ way, and Senate Minority Leader Charles “Entertainment” Schumer had jokes, which everyone hated.

But this is the bad place, so the fun couldn‘t last long. For months now various flavors of Fed have been in the boot, straight up jackin’ it, but persistently failing to provoke a photogenic protest response. The FBI tried arresting a judge, the U.S. Marshals harassed a lawyer over her Congressional testimony, and ICE detained a deputy U.S. Marshal and then deported a dozen of its own agents to a shipping container in Djibouti, both of which actually seem like steps in the right direction. But none of that really grabbed the public imagination, until this weekend when ICE finally struck fascist pretext gold with the Battle of Home Depot in Los Angeles.

The Imperial Boomerang is still very much in the air and this isn’t really a breaking-news kind of newsletter—it’s more of an oldsletter to be honest—so all I really want you to see from the weekend’s chaos in L.A. is this TikTok of a guy who looks a lot like Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt (but isn’t) self-consciously lecturing the National Guard while trying not to glance over at the camera recording him.

Yes he’s putting on a performance, but at the same time he is also very much spitting bars. “You’re tough behind your fucking masks, and your fatigues, and your weapons. But how do you feel on the inside?” Damn, bro. I don’t feel very good on the inside! How do you feel?

We’ll see what happens this week, but I’m confident that ICE will run out of tear gas and flashbangs long before Los Angeles runs out of good looking people who can improvise a stirring monologue on camera. At publication time, ABC News reports that Trump has ordered 700 Marines deployed to Los Angeles, a 500 square mile city with 3.8 million inhabitants. Best of luck to them carrying out the occupation.

Today in Hog: PostHog (a company that definitely knows, right?) announced developer toy DeskHog.

Other Ominous Developments: Towering black iceberg spotted off Labrador.

Today in Tabs: In Wired, Jason Parham gawked at “relationship anarchists” who seem like basically normal young people figuring out relationships. And the New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson wrote an entire profile of a right wing outrage farmer without apparently talking to a single other source besides the subject. When did we go from “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” to “if @Dom_Lucre says he happened across a still from a famously horrific child sexual abuse video on ‘a news website based in Indonesia,’ you can take that to the bank?” Embarrassing.

And Finally: At long last, they let Tabs pal Becca Laurie write something for the Brew, about the 2004 marketing program for Napoleon Dynamite. 

Today’s Song: Soul Coughing, “Screenwriter’s Blues”

This is a repeat but I can’t get it out of my head. Here’s hoping the ICE agents are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday… to die.

Stay safe and be brave, L.A. We’re all rooting for you. ❤️