During the first Republican debate in 2015, Donald Trump positioned himself as a bold truth-teller, almost a whistleblower, about the corrupt influence he’d exercised on politicians as a wealthy donor. The moderators asked why he’d given money to Democrats in the past, and he replied:
I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.
As Andrew Prokop dryly noted at the time, it was an unusual pitch. “Reformers usually present themselves as blameless.” Trump, instead, almost sounded like he was bragging. He presented himself as someone who’d played the system himself, knew it inside and out, and could thus be clear-eyed about what needed to be fixed.
Nine years later, Trump is preparing to start his second term as president. And one of his closest associates (and by far his most important political donor), billionaire Elon Musk, just used his wealth to influence the political process in a far more flagrant way than anything Trump was talking about on that debate stage in 2015.
Musk bought the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X) for $44 billion dollars in 2022. There’s every reason to suspect that he’s manipulated the site’s algorithm to boost his own posts. However that may be, he’s Twitter/X’s most popular user, with 207.9 million followers. Even the president-elect only has 96.2 million. Starting in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he used that megaphone to post 150 times about his opposition to a bipartisan spending deal intended to stop the government from shutting down just before Christmas.
During the election, Musk spent well over $200 million on two…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
