Taking Down Trump 2.0 - Rule 5
Trump constantly screws over his partners and cronies -- these people are all potential allies who can help win a fight against him. Even, just maybe, Elon Musk.
As we continue adapting the New York AG’s rules from Taking Down Trump to the resistance to the new administration, let’s turn to Rule 5.
Donald Trump is a faithless abuser who demands absolute loyalty but gives none in return — ask anyone who’s ever worked for Trump and is no longer in thrall to him. Or ask anyone who works for Trump right now but is willing to whisper things off the record even though they are too terrified to cross him or to leave his orbit. Even people who currently work for him despise him and only continue working for him out of fear.1
What happens, though, when these people escape — or are exiled? Or what happens to all the business or strategic partners whom Trump betrays or double-crosses or refuses to pay? He inevitably will. It is only a matter of time. Trump is inherently incapable of fulfilling his promises: indeed, he seems to relish the opportunity to prove his disloyalty to others, his cruelty, so that he can make examples out of people and keep everyone else afraid. He takes the people who love him the most or are closest to them and hurts them more than anyone. But what happens when some of these people realize they’ve been had?
As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Anyone who parts ways with Trump is a potential ally — and we must be eternally vigilant in identifying these people and working with them in any way possible.
We know who belongs in this category from the last decade: Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci, Gen. John F. Kelly, Mike Pence (sort of), John Bolton, Jenna Ellis (kind of), Omarosa Manigault Newman, and Chris Christie, and to various degrees, really most of the cabinet from Trump’s first term.
So who among Trump’s current cronies is a potential candidate? Literally anyone new to Trumpland may find themselves stabbed in the back, wheel around to see Trump holding the knife, and then turn on him.
Will Trump try to get JD Vance lynched by a mob? Probably too specific of a repetition. But we already know that Vance loathed Trump and held him in total contempt as recently as a few years ago, i.e. right up until the point that Vance wanted to run for a Senate seat from Ohio. Could Trump inflict some humiliation on Vance (perhaps as revenge for Vance’s past disrespect), and could Vance’s latent feelings about Trump rise back up to the surface?
What about Trump’s new chief of staff, Susie Wiles? Trump had four chiefs of staff in his first term, the most ever. So, statistically, Wiles is likely to be gone in a year or so. And her predecessors have not had the kindest things to say about the Donald, his lack of work ethic (or any ethic), his ignorance, or anything really.
What will happen if Vivek Ramaswamy — who was already exiled from Trumpland and booted completely out of DC — tries to run for governor of Ohio? And then Trump withholds his endorsement? Or endorses a rival? It would absolutely be on-brand for Trump to have promised Ramaswamy an endorsement in exchange for stepping away from the administration, only to pull the football away when it counts.
Or what will happen if Pete Hegseth has some sort of problem with his drinking? Trump has deep-seated hatred for anyone struggling with an addiction problem, going back to his brother Fred — and indeed, Trump may have picked Hegseth precisely because he has a clear weakness and would never have been given his role by anyone else, and thus Trump feels he can demand total loyalty from Hegseth. But what if Hegseth fails to do enough to mollify Trump? Or what if Hegseth causes a scandal for the administration resulting in bad publicity? There is a great deal of combustibility lurking there.
Yet perhaps none of Trump’s newer relationships is as highly combustible as his bromance with Elon Musk. This is new territory for Trump: normally he pulls into his orbit people who have far less money and power than he does, so he can control them. Musk is a different animal altogether — he has Trump’s hype man powers but used them to create much larger businesses (compare Tesla with, say, Trump Steaks). The power dynamic is inherently different, as Musk’s $277 million expenditure on Trump undoubtedly leaves Musk feeling that Trump owes him, well, his entire presidency.
Yet there are already very clear signs that Musk is losing the battles of palace intrigue.2 Wiles has now sent Musk away to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the West Wing — a devastating demotion for someone who had ensconced himself in a cottage at Mar-a-Lago for the entire transition period. Proximity is everything in the White House, and now Musk very much does not have it. Worse, he now has to go through Wiles in order to see Trump.
This all came in the wake of Musk getting into very public beefs with other major right-wing figures — including Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer, and the UK’s most visible far-right figure, Nigel Farage. Bannon, unlike Musk, is a veteran of infighting from the first Trump term, when Bannon was the one getting exiled; it is safe to assume he will stop at nothing to avoid losing such battles a second time.
Is Musk really going to pour his time and energy into being a second-tier bureaucrat who doesn’t have a West Wing security badge and has to scrape and grovel for the chance to attend meetings in the Oval Office now and then?
The answer is obviously no. Musk is going to get on his private jet and make himself the center of attention, as he was obviously trying to do with his Nazi salute — and his doubling down on it by speaking to the German neo-Nazi AfD Party and dog-whistling about Holocaust denial (saying that Germany should move past its historical guilt).
Well, how long is Donald Trump going to put up with someone who is supposedly part of his administration running around stealing headlines? In Trumpland, no one is ever allowed to get more publicity than Donald.
If the relationship explodes, then, what will be the fallout? Will Musk’s far-right fever break? Or will Musk try to back a different figure on the right? Will Trump seek retribution? Will Musk? Is there a chance that Musk will spill the beans on Trump in some way — pulling the lid off of dirty business during the campaign, or during the transition? Or is there a chance that Trump gives the green light for government power to be used against Musk, cancelling government contracts, revoking his security clearance, ramping up rather than squashing the various ongoing government investigations into Musk (including at the SEC)?
This is all speculation, of course. But it’s speculation right up until the moment that it isn’t. With the vast majority of people who become close to Trump, the question is not if there will be a blowup but when.3 And Trump’s inability to reciprocate loyalty is perhaps his biggest Achilles’ heel. So every single journalist or investigator or opponent looking into Trump should be scanning for those erstwhile allies to break with him. It will happen sooner than you think.
Others don’t necessarily fear him; it’s more that they themselves are manipulators and abusers and have calculated that they can use him to their advantage.
Which are not his forte. Musk has succeeded when he has come into a company from outside and taken over its leadership in exchange for being the company’s cheerleader — or when he has started it from scratch and been able to call all the shots unquestionably. Navigating an existing organization with various stakeholders and egos and without clear control? Musk has only had to do that once before, when he was briefly CEO of the post-merger PayPal. Musk lasted just six months, after which he was ousted in a coup by the Board of Directors, engineered by none other than erstwhile CEO Peter Thiel, who was brought back in to replace Musk. Back then, in 2000, Musk decided to forgive Thiel and the other coup plotters, which was a shrewd move (it may have been less about forgiveness per se and more that Thiel and the Board still had the power to preserve or to kill Musk’s stock options, which ended up being worth $250 million when PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002). It is unclear if today’s Musk will be as forgiving of betrayers.
There will be exceptions, of course. Some of Trump’s minions appear to have no other options, and thus, when Trump abuses them, they come crawling back every time. This would seem to describe Allen Weisselberg — and Rudy Giuliani.
With real fear I ask “why are those with actual power doing nothing?? “. Trump is breaking many laws and no one seems to be standing up for us. Democrats in congress were elected and have power. Why is nothing being done about all these illegal actions? Stopping funding that was authorized and assigned by the legislature is surely very illegal. In our neighborhood, pleas are going out to us to give money to help with the resettling of LEGAL refugees who have just arrived, as the government shared funding has been ordered to stop. These are our allies from Afghanistan in many cases. And this is a church group sponsoring them in our community to help them settle here. It’s a big job. Why isn’t anyone with actual power standing up??!! Can Trump just flout any law he pleases and everyone is too afraid to stop him or even attempt to stop him? This is very discouraging.
Where are these people that Trump has screwed over and over and over his entire life? I would think there are a massive number of people who have been burned by him, have had it with him and are more than ready to help put an end to the damage he has done to some many people. And now he is doing that same damage to everyone in America and millions around the world! The hurt and suffering will be massive and all of it caused by one man and his gang. This is not going to end well for anyone..........