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Jason Mittell's avatar

I keep thinking back to Musk's initial Twitter bid, which was partly a joke and he quickly tried to back out of. What if the courts had let him back out? Would he have remained on the political sidelines, just focused on hoarding wealth in his conventional businesses without a media platform to ruin and then repurpose for propaganda? At what point did he decide to become an emperor instead of just a massively wealthy troll?

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Glen's avatar
Feb 3Edited

To have a junta you need the military on your side, and for all the parallels with Hitler the one thing that Trump and Musk and the tech bros don't have, and that you need to pull a true takeover, is the respect and backing of the military establishment. If retaliatory tariffs and DOGE are levied against the US defense industry there's a good chance it will shorten his presidency. In his previous term the military did a lot of stuff to lessen Trump's authority over the military.

Putting someone who was a Major over a decade ago and a 'news' host since then, a person wholly unqualified for the job, in charge of the DoD isn't going to help. The military leadership are going to run rings around Pete Hegseth, and probably have a mountain of Kompromat to use against him if it comes to that.

The US is a militaristic republic, and if a leader wants to stay in power the one thing they don't do is mess with military leadership or the defense industry, and the US exports many more billions of dollars in arms than it does software. Though mostly we export resources like oil and some manufactured goods like planes and cars.

Given that fossil fuels are on the way out, and most countries are switching to more sane methods of transport infrastructure (rails and trails) the US is already hurting on exports. Canada and South America will just take over oil export contracts the US used to have and retaliatory tariffs will devastate the US economy.

I won't be surprised if some more attempts are made on Trump's life by disgruntled MAGAs who lost their jobs and can no longer find an electrician or plumber to work on their McMansion. It's what you get for making unrealistic promises to the most unhinged and well armed part of the US populace.

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