The British dancer Debbie McGee was once asked in an interview: “What first ever attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” Hopefully some day Donald Trump will be asked in an interview: “What first ever attracted you to the billionaire far-right sympathizer Elon Musk?”
Alas, the question was not put by the Fox News host Sean Hannity when he conducted a joint interview with the world’s most powerful man and Trump at the White House on Tuesday.
Even so, viewers were treated to a treacly display of the toxic bromance currently wrecking America and large swathes of the world. Who can resist three Maga men shooting the breeze about the size of Elon’s space rockets?
The commander-in-chief and oligarch-in-chief sat side by side like a breathless young couple announcing their engagement on live TV. Trump wore a blue suit, white shirt and blue tie; Musk wore a T-shirt saying “tech support” under a black jacket. The orangeness of Trump’s face threw the paleness of Musk’s complexion into sharp relief and vice versa.
Musk, the Tesla, SpaceX and X supremo who recently tweeted he loves Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man”, confirmed he is indeed mad about the boy. “Well, I love the president,” he said. “I just want to be clear about that.”
Sounding like he empathises, Hannity asked: “You love the president?”
Musk said: “I think President Trump is a good man.”
Trump was moved, like a man whose wife has not said that in many a long year. He interjected: “That’s the way he said that. You know, there’s something nice about.”
Musk went on: “The president has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It’s truly outrageous. And I’ve spent a lot of time with the president and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or – or wrong. Not once.”
Last month Trump exploited a deadly plane crash to blame his predecessors’s efforts to include people of colour in the federal workforce, but OK. Hannity took his chance to outdo Musk by boasting that he has known the president for 30 years and never known anyone deal with so much adversity, culminating in two assassination attempts.
Musk acknowledged that the first shooting, when a bullet grazed Trump’s ear at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, accelerated his decision to endorse Trump’s re-election bid. The president sounded like a fiancee learning a sweet secret about their first date.
“Nice”, Trump said: “I didn’t know that.”
Musk added: “Yeah, it just – it sped it up, but I was going to do it anyway.”
Like Romeo and Juliet, these star-crossed lovers are tragically misunderstood, in this case by vile media. “They want a divorce,” Hannity declared. “They want you two to start hating each other. And they try – ‘Oh, President Elon Musk’, for example. You do know that they’re doing that to you?”
Trump concurred. “Actually, Elon called me. He said: ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said: ‘Absolutely’.”
Then Hannity sounded like Oprah Winfrey interviewing Meghan and Harry. He said: “I want people to know the relationship and know more about you. What is the relationship, Mr President?”
Trump replied: “Well, I respect him. I’ve always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things, and I’m usually pretty good at this stuff. He did Starlink. He did things that were so advanced and nobody knew what the hell they were.”
He went on: “I think, you know, something that had an effect on me was when I saw the rocket ship come back and get grabbed like you grab a beautiful little baby. You grab your baby.”
after newsletter promotion
Musk chimed in: “Just hug the rocket.”
Hannity too: “You hug the rocket. You hug the rocket.”
Steady on!
Speaking of space, Trump and Musk seized their chance to lie about Joe Biden, blaming him for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams having been stuck on the International Space Station for eight months.
Musk said: “Yes, they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”
Trump added that Biden “was going to leave them in space … Yeah, he didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it?”
Can we believe that Biden was as ruthless and calculating as Hal 9000, casting astronauts into the cold abyss of space? No, we can’t.
Musk went on to mock “Trump derangement syndrome”, recalling how, at a friend’s birthday party in Los Angeles, he mentioned the president’s name, “and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, the methamphetamine and rabies”.
Some would say that fate is preferable to the hour of television that Fox News served up in prime time, a desperate attempt to justify Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, currently laying waste to the federal government. It is as if Trump said: ‘You had me at dismantling the administrative state.’
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
