Narcissistic Plutocrats -Trump, Elon Musk- are the Enemies from Within
Billionaires as Domestic Terrorists
First published in Brussels Morning Newspaper.
Brussels Morning is a daily online newspaper based in Belgium. BM publishes unique and independent coverage on international and European affairs. With a Europe-wide perspective, BM covers policies and politics of the EU, significant Member State developments, and looks at the international agenda with a European perspective.
On October 19th, the richest man in the world and political arsonist Elon Musk created waves on his platform X with a trending topic on his giving away $1 million lottery-style to Pennsylvanians’ who signed his America PAC petition. Voter registration is a prerequisite to sign the petition. After contributing an estimated $75 million to Trump’s campaign through his Super PAC, Elon Musk, worth $240-250 billion, is stumping for the ex-president in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania.
American television journalist Kristen Welker, on her NBC show Face the Nation on Sunday, October 20th, asked Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and former PA Attorney General, if this $1 million lotto scheme of Elon Musk’s was legal. He gave a ham-handed response that it should be looked into and came up with no reassurances that it is, in fact, illegal.
Many legal experts have chimed in, however, that Elon Musk has arguably violated federal election laws by buying votes for Trump with this $1 million daily giveaway until Election Day on November 5th. A total of $17 million will have been awarded, effectively cementing Elon Musk as an oligarch threatening democracy.
POLITICO’s Eugene Daniels and Rachel Bade report:
Federal law plainly bars anyone from paying or accepting money to vote or to register to vote, and some campaign finance experts believe that would include a high-stakes lottery with a voter registration requirement:
“You can’t give something of value to people in exchange for them voting or registering to vote,” campaign finance lawyer BRETT KAPPEL told WaPo. Added UCLA law prof RICK HASEN, to the AP: “The problem is that the only people eligible to participate in this giveaway are the people who are registered to vote. And that makes it illegal.”
Musk’s maneuvering may scuttle the law under the pretense that he is not overtly buying votes but rather seeking signatures on his petition to preserve the Constitution, namely the First and Second Amendments for free speech and the right to bear arms, respectively.
Both the First and Second Amendments have become co-opted flag-waving cornerstones of the Republican platform. Actual voting is not required to be in the running for the $1 million giveaway, hence, what some are arguing is the legal gray zone.
If the past is prologue, with America’s glacial judicial system, which has still not sufficiently nailed down Trump on his myriad crimes save his 34 felony counts, it seems unlikely that Musk, especially as the self-described “techno-king” (Technoking), will ever be adjudicated. After all, kings are above the law. Besides, all bets are off should Trump return to the White House; justice would be a moot point.
Recently identifying himself as part of “Dark MAGA,” at Trump’s campaign rally, Elon Musk is a trojan horse invading the US government. Crypto could very well facilitate the end of America as a country; the goal of anarcho-crypto has always been to subvert and override the dollar and, by extension, the United States government.
Typifying incestuous Silicon Valley, long before cryptocurrency’s ascent, Elon Musk’s business partner and JD Vance’s long-time backer, Peter Thiel, engineered a prototype solution to override the dollar in the initial framing of PayPal as an alternative monetary system with its founding in 1998.
Finally, just this week, the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The New Yorker have run pieces about Elon Musk’s full-throated embrace of Donald Trump.
Teasing out the implications of a Musk-Trump partnership involves connecting the dots from the seemingly inevitable Big Crypto’s usurpation of the US dollar (USD) and, by extension, an end-goal of terminating America as a nation-state in favor of sovereign network states. This radical uprising would represent a full bore expression of techno-feudalism, i.e., capitalism on overdrive with oligarch-lords on top (cloudalists) and cloud serfs on the bottom, the middle class, nowhere to be seen — vassalized.
JD Vance’s connection to Peter Thiel apparently did not signal Big Tech’s ingratiation to Trump’s campaign in blinking red lights — if we are to put a charitable take on the lack of mainstream reporting.
The mainstream media/corporate media has been radio silent on this consequential tech-signifying milestone of Theil-backed JD Vance joining Trump’s ticket as VP pick. More likely, if we follow the money, Big Crypto has put a muzzle on US politicians, namely Democrats, to press the panic button.
We find ourselves at the logical endpoint, extrapolated out from the devastating Citizens United decision in 2010, which laid the groundwork for this Gilded Age’s buying of American elections, and rendering America for sale by the highest bidder.
Trump has advanced the idea that Elon Musk, founder and/or owner of a juggernaut of companies — Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X (née Twitter), Neuralink, the Boring Company, amongst a panoply of other companies — would head up the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a move that would vault Musk’s status to American oligarch.
Elon Musk has every incentive to join ranks with anti-choice, Groypers-enabling conspiracy theorist values-aligned Trump. In many respects, this affiliation is a logical extension of a decade of the US government being Musk’s number one client to the tune of some $15.4 billion in federal contracts. Both Elon Musk and Trump share in common an extensive antisocial legal rap sheet and associated victimhood-based grudges that go with the territory of narcissism.
The New York Times reports, “Mr. Musk’s companies are increasingly facing regulatory battles and overlapping federal investigations from all corners of the government.” In this Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE as in Musk’s cryptocurrency, Dogecoin) role, he would be in a position to curb any and all regulations at loggerheads with “innovation.”
In her book released last month, former European Member of the European Parliament and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, Marietje Schaake emphasizes that despite her political history of being pro-tech, the tech movers and shakers that she met up with in Silicon Valley after moving from Amsterdam unrelentingly pounded the prerogative of Silicon Valley to innovate and that the only thing standing in the way of innovation were regulations.
To underscore the point, her adversarial interlocutors rubbed her nose in and implicated Europe’s lack of technological prosperity owing to regulations, never mind the more to-the-point reality that America, from its inception, has been driven by an esprit de corps of entrepreneurship.
Targeted regulations build reasonable guardrails that allow industry to thrive and grow while protecting society. Without these parameters, industry goes off the rails.
Marietje Schaake, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley
Schaake points out that far from stifling innovation, regulations have spurred innovation, such as when car manufacturers were obligated to improve cars’ fuel efficiency per the US Department of Transportation.
Enemies from Within
In recent days, Trump has doubled down in a battery of interviews and at his rallies on the notion of America’s fighting the “enemy from within,” which he claims “is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” He has urged that his enemies “should be put in jail.”
Specifically mentioned “enemies” are fellow Americans, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, along with a loosely held coalition of Democrats, “communists,” and “fascists,” who comprise not just his political opponents but his enemies and, therefore, by extension, America’s enemies.
To retaliate, Trump has openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy.
“He’s talking about the enemy within our country, Pennsylvania,” Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said to a jeering crowd. “He’s talking about that he considers anyone who doesn’t support him, or who will not bend to his will, an enemy of our country.”
Renowned journalist Bob Woodward reports in his new book, War, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, remarked on “the most dangerous person to this country” Trump, “No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than Donald Trump, and he is a fascist to his core,” echoing dire warnings of others in national security circles.
By claiming that the enemy is within, Trump reveals his psychopathology, namely, his projection, paranoia, and victimhood, all characteristics of narcissism.
Projection can be defined as when you deny negative parts of yourself (traits, cognitions, effects, emotions, behaviors, qualities) and attribute them to other people. You project parts of yourself that you are ashamed of, feel guilty about, and reject onto others.
Trump(ism) is a victimhood movement. Victimhood movements are anarchic; they're forms of anarchy. They don't want to truly reform anything. They want to punish and destroy. The only solution in the eyes of victimhood movements is to destroy all institutions. Victimhood movements always lead to an apocalypse.
Of the narcissist’s paranoia, narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin has stated:
Narcissism is a deformed emotional reaction to the narcissist’s perception of the world as unpredictably hostile, precariously balanced and illusory.
In such a universe, the inclination to see enemies everywhere, to guard against them, and to imagine worse, to be hypervigilant, is almost seductive and functional.
Moreover, the narcissist falls prey to delusions of goodness: important men deserve important enemies. The thinking goes that such overreaching power would look dubious without a proper set of adversaries, opponents, dissidents and enemies.
If you constantly believe that people are talking about you, concerned with you, monitor you, supervise you, if you are in a constant state of self-imputed surveillance, you become paranoid.
And to preserve his egocentric cosmology, the narcissist is compelled to attribute fitting motives and psychological dynamics to other people.
And such motives and dynamics have little to do with reality in all cases. They are projected by the narcissist onto others, so as to maintain his personal mythology.
The narcissist attributes to other people his own motives and motivations, his own psychological processes and psychodynamics.
And since narcissists are mostly besieged by transformations of aggression, since mostly they experience rage and hatred and envy and fear, these emotions they often attribute to other people.
And the narcissist just knows that he is a wonderful, powerful, talented, and entertaining person which is why they seek to undermine and destroy him, because he is perfect.
Since the narcissist is unable to secure long-term positive love, admiration, or even attention of resources (supply) because of his misbehavior and his abuse, people end up hating him, deriding him, decrying him, walking away, and abandoning him. Women end up cheating on him.
People end up betraying him, stabbing him in the back because of his abuse. He knows this and he knows that long-term, he cannot rely on people, on their love, commitment and investment.
So he results to a mirror strategy. In other words, the narcissist becomes paranoid. Better to be the object of often imaginary and always self-inflicted derision, scorn, and bile than to be ignored.
He says to himself, if I cannot be loved, let me be hated. If I’m about to be betrayed, let me betray first, or let me prepare myself.
Being envied is preferable to being treated with indifference. If he cannot be loved, the narcissist would rather be feared or hated than be forgotten.
When power gets concentrated in a handful of oligarchs, it necessarily erodes a population’s agency and self-determination, which is consistent with political narcissistic abuse, a lopsided power equation that regresses a population to a place of infancy.
Narcissism is zero-sum; Trump has framed his life in terms of winners and losers, which has helped this American contest of wills to reach a fever pitch in this election, with half of the population wanting to climb back into the MAGA womb and the other half seeking self-determination and self-efficacy. This narcissistic era boils down to a power struggle.
With mounting existential risks — climate change, AI, cryptocurrency, fascism, and war — a population looks for a psychological sense of safety. Some will want to regress to the infancy that Trump facilitates, and others will find comfort in the status quo. Introducing more change for the Democrats is not ego-syntonic (comfortable).
If it weren’t for government contracts, Elon Musk would not be nearly the billionaire he is today. Ingrate that he is, he is biting the hand that feeds him by putting steps in place, such as across-the-board deregulation and crypto’s domination, which will be key to toppling the US government. Undermining the systems, institutions, or persons who have catapulted one to stratospheric heights parallels narcissistic abuse in the abject gutting of the very foundations that have made the likes of Elon Musk whole. As a result, the US government stands precariously balanced.