Fridays in Trumpland: 5.30.2025
Going, going, gone?
As usual, today’s been a wild ride.
Elon Musk gave a putative farewell press conference in the Oval while sporting a shiner that he claimed came from telling his son to punch him in the face, with Trump pink eyed and mendacious as usual.
In the middle of it, though, came a tell: Trump said “Elon’s really not leaving– he’ll be back and forth.”
Of course, those of us who have been paying attention already knew this. You don’t rise to that much power and simply walk away from it.
And truthfully, I was a little more gobsmacked than usual this week at the willingness of the mainstream press to repeat the obvious lie that Musk was leaving government entirely to return to private business. Puff pieces claiming Elon was sad and wanted to restore his reputation. Profiles that talked about his “sacrifice” in going to work for Trump. Reporting just one step removed from advertising claiming that he was going to save his failing businesses and go to Mars by the end of next year.
And then this morning, after all that fluffery, the New York Times published in quick succession Michelle Goldberg’s opinion piece reminding everyone that Elon’s work at DOGE may have already killed 300,000 people, and an expose on Musk’s rampant drug use— ketamine, ecstasy and more, carried around in a “drug box”— throughout Trump’s campaign for president last year.
All this capped off a week of salacious speculation resulting from breaking news that Stephen Miller’s wife was leaving the administration to work for Musk, just a few months after Wired vaguely speculated that the Millers and Musk might be a throuple, and after Katie Miller had been assigned to be Musk’s handler on behalf of the administration. Katie Miller didn’t help matters by changing her banner on X to a phallic photo of a SpaceX rocket taking off.
No less than the official social media account of the Democrats doubled down on the rumors today, posting a photo of a chair in a corner and tagging Stephen Miller, with the seeming implication that Miller was, in the brutal words of toxic masculinity, a cuck– someone who enjoys watching his wife have sex with other men.
So how much damage has Elon done to our government and to our social fabric? How much of our data has he stolen, and will he ever be held accountable? And did he actually steal Stephen Miller’s wife in the process?
The truth is yet unknown, but suffice it to say, gone or not, he’s left enormous wreckage in his drug-addled, white supremacist, pathetic little breeder man baby wake.
Speaking of which, yesterday, I had a long conversation with a friend about what happens when you actually realize these men are truly pathetic.
In a strangely reassuring way, we decided, seeing them for the immature, incapable, incompetent whiny little boys they are makes it easier to cope with their destruction.
Narcissists don’t ever get better– they only decline and collapse.
Fascists cause enormous violence and harm, but no fascist dictatorship has ever survived to rule into perpetuity.
Eventually, they collapse under the weight of their own self-destruction, their pathetic persecution complexes, and their unwillingness to account for the harm they cause.
We’re seeing inklings of that this week everywhere.
Republican town halls have been a fiasco this week, with booing and heckling in hard red districts at the mention of Elon’s name and at the budget bill that is set to cut Medicaid, the ACA and SNAP benefits.
Trump’s trade policies were shot down by two courts, followed by Stephen Miller getting into a virtual shouting match with China online.
Favorite neighbors and friends are being snatched by ICE all across the nation, causing a reckoning in states that went for Trump.
We’re seventeen months out from the midterm elections now, and at least as of today, things are not looking up for MAGA and its truly pathetic emissaries.
But as for us? We who care about the future and are fighting to make it better? We must make certain that we don’t lose ourselves in the process of living through this.
One of the most important things we can do as we move through this time, in addition to working to organize and support our vulnerable and marginalized neighbors, is to find our own way to daily moments of stability.
I’m not going to claim it’s easy when it seems like the world is falling apart.
But it is very important that we cultivate our own spaces of stability, offline and in our daily practices.
The next time you feel a sense of calm, don’t chase it away with doomscrolling. Sit with it for a minute, and feel what it feels like in your body.
And then consciously decide to return to that space daily, remembering the feeling itself.
Stay present, for as long as you can.
We have enormous work to do, but there are so many reasons to stay in the work. We can be loud or we can be stealthy, but we must keep going.
And it’s time to keep our chins up. All hope is not gone– not by a longshot.
See you next week.
About fifteen years ago, I knew that I was called to do something bigger than where I found myself in life. I knew that I was here to create societal change on a massive scale, but I didn’t know where to start.
If that’s you, too, I want to invite you to apply for a free strategy call. Our new endeavor, The Ripple Effect Institute, may be exactly what you need to get started.
Thank you Elizabeth, you never fail to encourage us to keep going and stay strong.
My neighbor still flies trump flag. We are frozen in time.