Donald Trump hugs Elon Musk at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show on October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
When the two men's ideas clash, as over China in the recent shutdown dispute, Musk gets his way.
24 December 24
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For a new world we need new words.
Facing the coming Musk-Trump regime, we will have to be creative. It will not be enough just to rely on the standard terms that come to easily to our lips and pens ("administration," "presidency", and the like). That normalizes the abnormal.
And to repeat unreflectively the words that Musk and Trump and other mumpers use is to take part in the transformation that they bring. Opposition requires clarity and clarity requires concepts. "Mump regime" is one I propose.
Musk+Trump, keeps the two men who currently matter the most, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in the proper order.
Musk matters more than Trump. He is the one with the money, the one to whom Trump owes debts. Musk also has a much more lively sense of his own interests and more energy generally. When the two men's ideas clash, as over China in the recent shutdown dispute, Musk gets his way.
"Mump regime" also keeps front and center the basic issue of illness. Democracy is closely connected to health. The historic path to modern political peace and the rule of law led through two stages: vaccines and institutions of public health. Americans have never broken through to a universal health insurance system, and the associated disease, death, fear and poverty is a central problem for our democracy. Now the mumpers and the mumpets are threatening to take away vaccination, which could kill millions of people. One of the diseases it would bring back is, precisely, mumps. Some of the others are far worse.
"Mump regime" is also better, at this point, than "MAGA." That term was always Trump's propaganda, and Trump simply does not matter as he once did. So “MAGA” is not only misleading but obsolete.
MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again." "Make" -- no one is going to make anything. "America" -- the people in charge are largely from elsewhere, and America is no mumper's object of concern. "Great" -- small and fractures is more likely. "Again" -- this level of oligarchy is new, as is the fascist language. We have moved on from a politics of eternity, an obsession with an imaginary past, to a politics of catastrophe.
"Mump regime," on the contrary, helps us to confront a real future. We are heading for a situation in which the fracturing of the government is deliberate and the weakness of the society desired. Some people talk of being the change they want to see in the world; the mumpers are the catastrophe their ideology tells them is inevitable.
And "Mump regime" prepares us mentally for the very real possibility that this form of politics can go on without Trump.
Musk himself is obviously completely unconcerned by the results of elections; it means nothing to him that people voted for Trump. Indeed, the fact that he was able to use a meaninglessly small portion of his wealth to get Trump in office can only breed contempt of both the man and his electorate.
Musk’s current public humiliation of Trump may very well be part of a plan. Make the man look weak; and then make him look crazy; and then invoke Article 25 of the Constitution and put him to bed. I am not saying that I am sure that this will happen: but rather that it is the kind of thing that would be normal in a Mump regime but would be all but unthinkable in a "presidency" or an "administration."
Trump is a fake rich person, and Musk is the richest person on earth (except, possibly, Putin). Trump is crazy like an improv comedian, but Musk is crazy like a guy with satellites. Musk surely understands, even if Trump does not, that the welter of policies we will see in the first six months of the Mump regime will be contradictory and chaotic.
Where does popular sentiment go when tariffs increase prices, as they must? When Canada and Mexico enforce countermeasures which push prices still higher? And when government spending on deportations (which would, at least as planned, cost about a trillion dollars) also brings inflation?
And that is just one example. Will Americans actually like a defense department and an FBI designed for domestic conflict? If all of this goes crazily wrong, Trump will be to blame. It is at least worth considering the possibility that Musk foresees all this.
At the moment, left-wing commentators laugh that J.D. Vance has disappeared from public view, displaced by Musk. Thinking of a Mump regime helps us to see Vance's absence differently. There cannot be MAGA without Trump, but there can be Mump without Trump.
For Musk and for kindred oligarchs, Vance is a more natural ally than Trump. He speaks their language and seems to believe the libertarian-fascist amalgam according to which government itself is doomed and therefor a strong man must rule. Vance was chosen by the oligarchs to be vice-president.
In the two scenarios above -- Musk drives Trump visibly crazy; six months of chaos is blamed on Trump-- Vance would be the successor. Staying in the background for now thus makes perfect sense for Vance. A quiet Vance does not look crazy, and is not tainted by Trump's six months of chaos. He is available when Musk is ready to move on from Trump.
As Musk once tweeted, "we will coup whoever we want." Whoever we want.
We also need a term like "the Mump regime" to classify Republicans. It offers a vocabulary that helps us to sort people out according to their involvement in and fealty towards Musk. The people who are active in the Mump regime are mumpers. The people who go along are mumpets.
But not all Republicans are mumpers, only a select few -- and, indeed, Musk and Trump and Vance lack a traditional Republican background. The mumpers are a select group, like a politburo: a few people, who can be brought in and pushed out. Those beyond the small circle of mumpers who support the Mump regime are mumpets, a much broader group.
Plenty of Republicans follow Musk. But these are not the same people, exactly, who would follow Trump. And as we have seen from recent votes on the shutdown, there are Republican elected officials who are not mumpets. Not all Republicans actually want to see Congress rendered obsolete by one-man rule and the United States cease to exist as a republic.
With terms like "Mump regime," "mumpers," and "mumpets" we can parse the present reality and prepare for the future much better than we can with "presidential administration," "Republicans," or "MAGA."
"Mump regime" also gives us adjectives, like "mumpy," "mumpier," or "mumpified." Beyond domestic politics, it can help us towards understanding (topic for another post) the United States as "the sick man of the world" in foreign policy, as we will likely be.
Musk is right that he is bringing something new; what he is not bringing is a tyranny so great that we cannot think for ourselves and name things for ourselves. Indeed, holding tyranny back begins with just that.
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