By Maureen Dowd / The New York Times
Tom Stoppard wrote in “The Real Thing,” his enticing play about infidelity: “To marry one actress is unfortunate. To marry two is simply asking for it.”
Here’s a political corollary: To elect one Emperor of Chaos is unfortunate. To let two run the government is simply asking for it.
Presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mindsets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.
With a pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government; and the globe.
Queasy D.C. denizens are waiting anxiously to see whether judges can save the country from the scofflaws running it.
The two unchecked and unbalanced billionaires are entwined in a heady and earth-shattering relationship.
“I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Musk posted on the social platform X on Friday.
He may simply be offering affection to ward off any jealousy Trump felt when he saw Time’s new cover illustration: Musk in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.
Musk is brainy but he’s not your usual presidential brain trust.
Although everyone in Washington, including some in Trump’s inner circle, expect the two pathological narcissists to barrel into each other, they both seem to be getting what they want from the relationship.
Trump loves to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government.
The president and the tech lord even have progeny, little Elons: the lost boys of DOGE, a gang of Gen-Zers in jeans with backpacks and bags of Doritos bursting into federal agencies to gut them and force bureaucrats to justify their existence.
Their backgrounds and work are shrouded in secrecy, even as they access the government’s most sensitive information.
“Muskrats,” as the bureaucrats they call “dinosaurs” named them, are rifling the government’s computers. A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym “Big Balls” lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, “I was racist before it was cool,” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Even though he is married to an Indian American, Vice President J.D. Vance rescued the “kid,” as he called him, and helped him get his job back.
It’s not that we don’t need to rein in spending, including what is spent on risibly PC programs. But the disdain for Congress and the rule of law, and the glee at erasing so many jobs and programs, as if there is no human cost, is reprehensible. We are, after all, only carbon-based beings.
The lost boys of DOGE fit in well with the “Mean Girls” attitude of Trump’s Washington. On Friday, the DOGE X account posted before-and-after pictures of the U.S. Agency for International Development entrance; they had stripped it of all identification. Their post even trolled Kamala Harris, using her viral phrase: “Unburdened by what has been.”
The Silicon Valley digerati don’t care about the old world in Washington, D.C., churning out meddlesome regulations, laws and taxes. They are cocky about creating a new world, shaped by a new species, AI.
Donald and Elon are emotional time bombs, lashing out in the crudest and cruelest ways. Trump’s amoral, puerile, wrecking-ball style is now squared by Musk’s.
It’s rich that the world’s richest man is rooting around trying to wipe out vast numbers of government workers, saying, “Sorry, you can’t have your $85,000-a-year job and your health insurance.”
“They don’t care if the government delivers food or comes in and rescues your town from a flood or teaches poor kids in the inner city because they don’t have to live through any of those things themselves,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “They’re rich and powerful, so they’re insulated from consequences of their actions.”
Trump cares about being popular and Musk doesn’t. So their relationship will probably remain strong until Elon cuts so many benefits from the Trump faithful that they tell Trump they no longer love him.
And the bromance may not end with a bang. It could very well end with a bot.
When Trump turns 80, as a birthday present, Elon and the lost boys could create an AI-fueled Trump bot, a real-time video head trained on his news conferences and everything he has ever tweeted.
Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, slyly says that Trump would be “an unusually easy person to plausibly fake.”
“Gradually it’ll be normalized,” Lanier told me. “People will get used to it more and more, and then it’ll actually start to be treated as the president. If you look at it on your phone or your computer, it would look just like him. The underlying software could be presented as a hologram onstage. It might even run in the next election. And they’ll go to the Supreme Court and say, ‘We know that the president can only have two terms, but this isn’t really the president. This is the Trump bot and AIs are people, too.’ Essentially allowing a continuation of the same administration into a third term.”
All Hail President Trump Bot, engineered by Elon Musk.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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