It’s settled. Donald Trump is a Tesla car salesman. If you have any doubts, then I refer you to Trump and Elon Musk’s appearance on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday to plug the flagging car brand. That’s right, Tesla’s been suffering under Musk’s leadership – particularly after he embraced Trump to the point where many can’t tell where one man begins and the other ends. Angry customers have protested Tesla dealerships, sales have suffered and Tesla’s stock has tumbled.
So there they were on the South Lawn in a red “S” series Tesla; Trump fumbling around pretending to be enamored of the computer software, while his faithful Renfield, Musk, smiled donning a black MAGA hat and his usual casual attire. For the richest guy on the planet, he certainly has a limited wardrobe. But to his credit, the pair looked like they were on a date. Trump would like to say he’s the husband, but some suspect he and Musk have swapped genders in that relationship.
They smiled and laughed. All that was missing was a big screen and a WWE match to make it a superlative bro’ down. The perfect commercial. As it turns out, this was a very expensive commercial for Tesla. A quick reminder; Musk gave over a quarter of a billion dollars through his super political action committee, America PAC to the president and Republicans in 2024.
True to form, Trump promised to buy a Tesla.He picked the “S” class when prompted. The Secret Service may not allow him to drive it, but he’s going to park one in front of the White House nonetheless.
An hour after that announcement, several news organizations reported that Musk is now mulling contributing another $100 million to Trump and the Republicans.
Quid meet pro quo.
It would be unfair, however, to categorize the live-streaming commercial as nothing but a commercial — because a bigpart of it was about payback to former President Joe Biden.
More than 50 days into his new administration Trump continued to criticize his predecessor, claiming that Biden would never do what Trump did from the White House.
That part he got right. And he is correct in more ways than he knows. But the key point is this: Tuesday’s event at the White House was a response to Biden promoting the United Auto Workers Union and electric vehicles when he actually drove a Jeep Wrangler on the White House grounds on Aug. 5, 2021.
I was there that day and remember a few questions being tossed Biden’s way concerning the lack of Tesla products on the South Lawn – since Musk’s Tesla brand was and is a pioneer in electric automobiles. Biden and his people were quick to remind everyone that while Tesla hires about 140,000 workers, almost none of them are union workers. That stung.
Tuesday Elon Trump and Donald Musk got their revenge. Or so they thought.
This wonderful commercial interruption, however, takes place as a trade war due to tariffs escalates across the globe, threatening an unnecessary recession, along with more pain and suffering for the middle class. This is an unforced error that Trump won’t acknowledge he made, but then he rarely acknowledges responsibility for anything.
Trump’s people, including White House press secretary, or as I like to call her, Pep Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told us Trump is on top of things and that corrections have to be made because the ship of state has been set adrift by the previous administration. Even if that were true, and it certainly is not, the question has to be, “Have you lost your f***ing mind?”
Tuesday the Pep Secretary said in her weekly briefing that tariffs are tax breaks for American consumers. Even Fox News didn’t buy that and Leavitt was left getting testy, angry and “insulted” when reporters questioned her knowledge of economics.
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Too bad. That’s our job. We question authority and there is so very much to question when it comes to Trump’s authority. And you don’t have to be exceptionally bright to recognize something is wrong – just look at the press corps. Even we are starting to get it.
My father was also a new car salesman, and much better than either Elon Trump and/or Donald Musk. I once came to pick up my pop for lunch on the Ford car lot at which he worked. He asked me to wait a minute as he handed his business card to a potential customer eyeing cars on the lot. The man snapped at my father, complaining that he wasn’t about to be hustled and my dad was a pig for interrupting him. I wanted to jump in and defend dad’s honor, but with a brush of a hand dad waved me off.
“This will be the easiest sale I make all day,” he whispered to me. Pop knew people. He sold the man a car and a truck and I walked away in awe. Pop never lost his temper and did nothing but smile. He was never petulant, argumentative or stubborn – though I knew he was easily capable of those emotions.
Trump is the opposite of my father. He always gives into his baser instincts. He always looks to see how low he can go while telling people what they want to hear. He’s the worst car salesman. He’d have you buying a used Pinto, paying too much for it and claiming he had no idea of the public knowledge that it would blow up when struck from the rear. “That was Biden’s fault. Can you imagine how bad that guy was?” he’d say. “They say he’s the worst salesman. Absolutely the worst. I’m here to clean up after his fire sale.”
He acts like the Energizer Bunny to obtain the only goal he’s ever had: Avoiding responsibility for anything he’s done his entire life.
Trump’s idea of cleaning up is to burn it all down. He’s the car salesman who sells you a lemon, burns down the dealership, destroys the manufacturing, advertising and even the instruction manual and tries to make you think you’re benefiting from it.
Imagine Nicholas Cage’s Dracula as Donald Trump selling cars. Musk as Renfield and the rest of us, including his friends, family and neighbors, are prey. So far no one has been able to effectively force Trump into the sunlight for any length of time, so he has continued his vampiric lifestyle with a flourish unseen since God cleansed Egypt for Moses.
“A warranty? No. No warranty. Not here. Okay. We have one, but it was planted by the FBI. OK I have a warranty for you, but I declassified it in my mind. You’re out of luck,” the vampire Donald would say before grinning and piercing your neck with his hollow money-fangs.
Trump is dangerous, exceedingly so. But let’s be honest, Count Donald is also getting exceedingly boring. He has no imagination in his criminality; no panache, no style, no originality. Hell, if you stand up to him he’s not even that scary. He’s just a schoolyard bully with less brawn and brain than he thinks, but excels at survival. He’s conniving, manipulative and has somehow incredibly managed to survive flying on the seat of some very thin pants since his father sent him out to collect rent as a budding slumlord.
Trump has no empathy card which makes him the perfect political wife to Musk who has apparently equated empathy with the fall, not the rise of civilization.
After seven weeks in office, if you’re not bored and want to change the channel on this, you’re either a minion or perhaps suffering serious brain damage – the kind that occurs when your head is impaled on an iron rod.
“Let the Golden Age of America begin,” Trump hissed like an arthritic snake just before his administration played whack-a-mole with 1300 full time employees in the Department of education. “I feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all,” he told us. “Many of them never showed up to work. Many of them, many of them never showed up to work.”
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Turns out that Trump isn’t just a vampire, but he likes to play with his food before he eats it. Worse, he’s unaware his prey are sentient beings. They are merely either food or currency to him.
There is no way any of this ends well, despite Trump’s preternatural ability to avoid the piercing light of day. In the most likely scenario, Trump merely expires on the back nine of Mar-a-Lago sometime during the next four years. Having already spent two weeks of his first 50 days there, there is statistical data to support this idea. The golf ball and his body hit the ground hard at the same time after he shanks one into the underbrush.
Trump escapes any legal responsibility for his criminal acts and his minions and the world at large are left holding the bag.
The cleanup could resemble post World War II Europe, or worse. Then again, it may go down as easy as waking from a collective nightmare as the people of the world say in unison, “Wow, so that’s what taking the wrong acid at Woodstock was all about.”
Donald Trump isn’t Hitler, no matter how similar the two appear to be. Those similarities are superficial because Trump is superficial. As evil as he appears to be, he also appears to many across the world as an aging grifter whose only redeeming quality is his single-minded resolve.
I remember asking former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during Trump’s first administration if she thought he was above the law. She said no. His actions state otherwise.
But let’s be clear about who Donald Trump really is: a vampiric, exceedingly bad new car salesman who’s only trying to avoid the light of day. He thinks he can get away with whatever he wants because he’s done it his whole life. He is a boring, boorish grifter hell bent on declaring this the “Golden Age” of America by totally destroying it. And if he’s caught in the act, he’ll blame someone else and continue on his way. No one ever really stops him. He acts like the Energizer Bunny to obtain the only goal he’s ever had: Avoiding responsibility for anything he’s done his entire life. Making everyone else pay after he dies is merely icing on the cake. He’ll be happy merely going to his grave never having to pay the piper. If he can avoid paying the piper and avoid the grave, he’s in for that too.
That’s why he’s a vampire.
There is no deep thought rattling around in Trump’s head. There’s no grand plan. He’s merely trying to survive and thrive and he’ll do anything to make sure that happens. You have to admire the focus and single-mindedness of this pursuit. Or, you could also realize he’s incapable of having more than one thought on his mind. That is both his greatest danger and his greatest weakness.
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