Is Rahm the Answer? And Musk’s German Muse
I am pinning my resistance hopes on Rahm Emanuel, back from Japan where he was a lapidary U.S. ambassador, and now waging a war against the impenetrable political language of Democrats that may be the single biggest reason that Trump pulled off his comeback. (They should have made Rahm head of the DNC but instead picked Minnesota nothingburger Ken Martin.)
There's never been a more appropriate time to hear from Rahm, the intellectual pugilist who rose from Clinton aide-de-camp to Obama chief of staff to big city mayor, the consummate political strategist with the smashmouth style that belies the pointy head beneath. Recently signed as a CNN commentator, Rahm now emanates a lethal, silver-haired composure, perhaps honed from his sojourn in Japan, and is lighting up the podcast circuit with his bull’s-eye understanding of what sank his own party. In December, he told Ezra Klein, “Yelling at people, ‘Well, crime is coming down,’ doesn’t work. Let me tell you something as a former mayor: Nobody walks around going, ‘You know what? I feel 22% safer in 2024 than I did in 2023.’ ” Rahm continued, “We (Democrats) end up defending the rules rather than the results…We defend a status quo that is broken.”
And he’s right. The sight of the esteemed Elizabeth Warren (who, with persistence and vision, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 crash) planted in her nubby blue overcoat outside its HQ before a sign saying “Hands off our CFPB” made me want to curl up in the fetal position. Is this our rallying cry? Will her next photo op be marching around with a sign saying “Save our IRS” (more Rahm advice: stay away from acronyms) now that Musk has sent his brainy little data-heads to rummage around over there? In a gleeful fundraising email over the weekend, Trump—with his unerring understanding of what arouses the loathings of his base—asked his supporters whether he should let Musk audit the tax agency. “Are you sick of being targeted and harassed by the I.R.S.?” he asked. “Well maybe it’s time that somebody audited them for a change!”
The culture of politics and its actors has shifted at warp speed and it’s not going back. I now feel the worst thing that happened to the Dems was Trump being re-elected in 2024 rather than 2020. There would have been no Big Lie or January 6th choir singing us into four years of conspiracy theories. There would have been no wasted efforts to put Trump behind bars that merely served to make him a vengeance-crazed hero to the MAGA faithful, no four years of him outlawed in his gilded Elba surrounded by a posse of rabid ideologues, kleptocrats, and misfits who are now at his side at the White House, schooled this time in where the levers of power lie.
Most importantly, we would not have been deluded by the Biden hallucination of Things Going Back to What They Used to Be. The notion that the country could be restored to a Cretaceous pre-Trump era of reverence for the Constitution, security treaties, and the Rooseveltian state was like imagining the Newport Folk Festival could ever be the same after Bob Dylan showed up in 1965 with his electric guitar.
The Biden interregnum just allowed the Democratic old guard to stew in their timid appeasement of the far left for another four years and keep repeating the liberal dogma that the rest of America had started to hate. Only two weeks ago, the outgoing chairman of the DNC Jaime Harrison reassured the flock, “Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections.”
It’s worth comparing Harrison’s almost parodic communication style- and what he thinks voters are up at night about - to that of JD Vance on Face the Nation on Jan 26. When host Margaret Brennan challenged the VP with the injustice of Afghan refugees waiting to be admitted into the U.S., Vance equably replied, “I don't really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.” The callousness was breathtaking, but the clarity was unmistakable. Surely, there is a way to communicate that is neither mothballed in virtuous euphemism nor repugnantly heartless. Faced with a choice, alas, clarity wins. Vance’s response became an instant meme with “I don’t really care, Margaret” T-shirts for sale on Amazon.
Vance v. Munich
Meanwhile, at the Munich Security Conference, Western allies sat in stunned silence as Vance essentially kissed off the 75-year U.S.-European security alliance and hectored them for limiting what they consider hate speech, and for banning the AfD, Germany’s far-right party, from the possibility of joining the ruling coalition. Vance’s flirtation with the AfD and the fever dream of pan-European authoritarianism finally convinced the ashen delegates that, when it came to Ukraine, they are on their own. Ahead of his meeting with Trump next week, British PM Keir Starmer penned a piece in The Telegraph announcing for the first time that British peacekeeping troops on the ground in Ukraine are not out of the question.
The unambiguity of Trump’s disregard of Europe has aroused fearful ghosts of Germany’s past, ghosts that Elon Musk, just before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, told Germans they should think less about. But outside the confines of the Munich gathering, on the day after an Afghan asylum seeker injured 30 people ramming a car into a crowd in Munich, there was also dark fascination with Vance’s expression of Trump’s hard-assed transactionalism. As one German commentator about the far right put it to me wryly, “We still love a good Führer, the strong man fighting off the migrant hordes.”
The role of Musk in Vance’s enthusiasm for theAfD seems to have been influenced by a waif-like, blonde 24-year-old German activist Naomi Seibt who, at the age of 19, positioned herself as the anti-Greta Thunberg by warning against “climate alarmism.” Seibt, who describes Musk as “basically still a small child, but incredibly intelligent,” entered the toxic slipstream of his X feed in June 2024 when he responded to her post stating that she is an AfD supporter. It was the lissom Ms. Seibt who suggested Musk’s January interview on X with AfD party leader Alice Weidel. Musk lavished praise on Weidel, a self-possessed, blonde Valkyrie whose lesbian bona fides are a useful smokescreen for her hard-right positions, including to “end queer woke insanity.” Just days ahead of the German elections on Sunday, the AfD, which is classified by Germany's domestic security service as a "suspected extremist organisation” is second in the polls.
This is how the power currents now work in the geopolitical sphere. Naomi Seibt, a Gen Z social media siren gets into Musk’s head during his nocturnal scrollings and becomes a voice that influences the multi-billionaire whispering in Trump’s ear.
Having read Seibt’s social media and that of other AfD devotees, Reuters Berlin correspondent Thomas Escritt notes, “the algorithms are now showing me an absolute sewer of misogyny, violence and authoritarianism. That's actually a useful message in my view: it demonstrates that seemingly unconnected extremist and authoritarian philosophies often reflect the same underlying ideas. It also raises another question: in an echo chamber, who is the payer and who's the piper? Musk may have radicalised his platform, and that's radicalising his followers: but they, in turn, are radicalising him.”
Oh shit.
Well, at least we’ll have these highly readable diary entries from Tina to keep us entertained during the new authoritarian age in America. And with our pontificating VP’s rock solid commitment to free speech, she should be able to keep going - as long as she doesn’t go to work for the AP. (I often ask myself after I bump into Vance’s latest pronouncement precisely where he gets off. On the basis of what lived experience did he arrive at these rules to live by? Yale Law School? Appalachian home boy? Bromance with Don Jr.? Newfound Catholicism? Silicon Valley investment manager?) It is, however, a rather striking indictment of the American electorate that our authoritarian, our own fuhrer, is so obviously the weakest of them all. There’s the KGB graduate Putin, the lawyer and supple politician Orban, the master of in-fighting and CCP bureaucracy Xi, and then there’s King Cheeto - a failure at each and every one of his adult undertakings outside of demagoguery. Sure, irony died a few years back. But still … we have the weakest, tiniest man in the world being led around by a crazy, unelected tech billionaire in the dismantlement of a supposed “deep state.” They said that when fascism came to America it would come wrapped in a flag and thumping a bible. But they didn’t say the flag-draped thumper would be - to employ Tina’s phrase - the biggest “nothingburger” of them all.
Will you be joining Bluesky? It’s bizarre for good people to be on X anymore— a site full of pornography and the most hateful content that the most deranged people of our society can conjure. That’s not a political opinion, it’s the business plan.