Git Along, Little Doges

It's your misfortune. I hope.

Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

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I got what I think is a big clue as to what is going on in the administration in general from the inestimable Ed Kilgore at New York magazine, in his note on Russell Vought, the incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget (and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, possibly the single government agency to which Vought is most opposed) and principal author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 for "deconstructing" democratic government.

Kilgore describes Vought, elegantly, as a form of glue, the man who holds the fractious Republican coalition together in spite of itself:

To borrow a sports term, Vought is a “glue guy,” or to use another sports metaphor, the “straw that stirs the drink.” He’s the team member who lifts the performance of everyone around him without necessarily being the big star himself. And if you are alarmed by the counter-revolutionary ambitions of this administration, that should make him a very scary man for real.

but adds that one of the most important things Vought glues to is the mercurial figure of Mr. Elon Musk, with whom he's said to have been cultivating a personal relationship since the election:

A senior administration official said Vought and Musk have been building a partnership since just after Trump’s victory in November.

“They share the same passion for making the federal government more efficient and rooting out waste, corruption and fraud, so I think they are very aligned,” said Wesley Denton, a longtime adviser to former Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and a Vought friend.

Not a passion that President Trump has ever notably shared, I think—he's made some of the usual Republican rhetorical gestures toward cutting federal spending, but then his actions during his term, 1.7% of the history of the Republic, raised the national debt by a staggering 25% or $8.8 trillion (true, almost half of that was devoted to the pandemic relief program, but more than half of it wasn't; by contrast, the Biden administration had by June 2024 borrowed $6.2 trillion, including $2.1 trillion on pandemic relief, but offset the other spending with $1.9 trillion in deficit reduction, so that the net debt increase was $4.3 trillion, less than half of that under Trump).

I found it clarifying that Vought and Musk have their own relationship, though, independent of their relationships with Trump; it suggests an interesting solution to the problem of who's in charge here, if that's one of the things that's been bothering you, which it may have been if you've been following the debate about whether Trump is the boss of Musk or Musk is the boss of Trump. The structurally suggested answer, based on their lines of communication, may be that it's neither of them, and not Vought either: it may be a genuine triumvirate, in which nobody is the technical superior, with their responsibilities allocated according to the different capacities and interests of each, and maybe ambiguities that they have to work out among themselves from day to day.

Thus, at one level, Trump is the man of official power, the one who got elected, the one with the charisma and the votes, though he's too ignorant and stupid to come up with any plans outside his own personal interests; Musk, richest man in the world, is the Crassus or Lepidus figure who bankrolls the operations, and falsely believes he is running them; and Vought is the man of inside power, the real Caesar (maybe more Octavian than Julius in this analogy) with a far broader understanding of what he get away with.

OK, so this analogy probably fails, for our own time, but I would like to suggest that it's very interesting what it leaves out: that it's the finance guy who is most likely to lose out, in the medium-to-long run; it's the organization guy who is likely to win. And the Republicans' organization guy isn't very good at organizing.