Alan Zendell, December 28, 2024

Donald Trump has spent his professional life making promises to people to get what he wants, with little or no regard to whether he intended to keep them. Doing so got him elected President twice. The effectiveness of his pandering, his willingness to string everyone along while having neither the intention nor the ability to make good on his promises has been shocking. But like most indulgences, too much of a good thing can backfire.

Trump is now finding out that it’s one thing to pander to poorly educated rural Americans, to enthralled evangelists, to people who work hard and get little to show for it and convince them that they’re being screwed by their government, and to play into every dark prejudice and repressed hatred in his base; but it’s quite another to make false promises to billionaire supporters who have egos as large as his. You can promise lambs that they’ll be safe from predators and wolves that they’ll always be well fed. But try to get them to live peacefully under one big tent, and their basic natures take over.

Trump’s MAGA base has generally been very obedient. They drink his Kool Aid and cheer his outrageous behavior. They buy into his misogyny, bigotry, and xenophobia making the MAGA movement seem like a cult. It’s really been remarkable that he’s been able to mold his movement into a monolithic entity that appears to speak with one voice, always loyal to their leader – no matter that he has never kept a single promise that benefits the bottom ninety percent of his base.

Trump’s apparently Teflon-like hold on his base has been what made it so intimidating to opponents. Imagine having the power to silence an opponent by merely threatening to have his gangster-like friends stage a primary fight before the next election. That worked for him for nearly ten years, and like any committed, power-crazed narcissist, he believed it always would. But Trump’s disdain for science and technology, and his fantasy that America is better off without immigrants caused him to cozy up to the real oligarchs who run our biggest corporations. They’re turning out not to be the easy marks the rest of his base are.

The most recognizable of the group is Elon Musk. He is an unquestioned genius, and a businessman who knows how to get things done without cheating and cutting corners. He is reputed to be the richest person in the world, ruthless, and completely lacking empathy, compassion, boundaries, or filters. In that, he mirrors much of Trump’s image of himself. And therein lies the problem that threatens to splinter the Trump administration into ineffective warring factions even before it gets off the ground.

Trump might have been able to buy Musk’s loyalty by erasing all government control over the information and technology sectors of our corporate economy and by clearing the way for him to take over the privatization of government functions that could yield profits greater than many national economies. But that loyalty will always be transactional, and Musk has shown that he will never bend the ideological knee to Trump or anyone else. Like Trump, Musk has his own following – of tech billionaires who, together, can wield as much power and influence as most nations.

Now that Trump’s coalition of MAGA loyalists and convenient allies who stood to profit hugely from his victory have one, we’re seeing signs that the two factions sharply disagree on much of Trump’s platform. Musk and his allies, for example, believe in science and support huge investments in education, especially math, science, and engineering. They also recognize that without a constant influx of immigrants and foreign workers, much of our economy would collapse, and the industries that survived would never be able to stand up to competition from China.

While Trump seems to have no interest in governing responsibly, Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others like them believe in getting things accomplished. They may have as little regard for the average American as Trump does, but when they succeed, their success positively affects millions of us. They have already thrown down the gauntlet against much of Trump’s MAGA philosophy whose only strength lay in getting him elected, and which, if somehow translated into policy, would do great harm to our economy and international standing, both of which would be extremely costly to the oligarchs who supported him.

Trump’s pandering has resulted in the same kind of chaos and disruption within the party he commandeered that he created among his opponents. Keep in mind that in today’s politics a president has only twenty-two months to achieve his goals before the voters weigh in to choose a new Congress. It shouldn’t take nearly that long for the MAGA base to realize that Trump has no clue how to reduce the price of groceries. That should make the next six months a lot more entertaining than many of us expected.