Humiliation

	Scenes from A Humiliation Rick Wilson Feb 12 ∙ Paid   A picture really does speak louder than words, and yesterday’s Oval Office briefing by President Elon Musk proved it in spades. There he was, in the most exclusive office in D.C., simultaneously manhandling the press while having one of his 11 spawn babysat by some poor subordinate. If Michelangelo were around, this tableau would be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—commissioned by a Medici who wanted to show off his power over the Pope Meanwhile, a slumped Donald Trump sat nearby, wearing the bored, empty stare of a man who wants nothing more than his afternoon pudding. You don’t need a body-language guru to see he’s thoroughly checked out: drooping shoulders, slack jaw, glazed eyes. His single moment of real engagement was with Musk’s kid, Glorbax_Rocketchild42069.¹ Musk—who has apparently given up even the faintest nod toward business casual—rocked a MAGA trucker hat, jeans, boots, and a T-shirt. Imagine the howls of fury from Fox if an Obama (remember Tan Suitgate?) or Biden advisor tried that look in the Oval. I can say from personal experience that any self-respecting political hack of yesteryear would rather die than step foot in that room without a jacket and tie. In my day, you marched to Brooks Brothers and bought a dark suit, crisp shirt, and red tie. That was the uniform. Musk, however, treats the office—and the man whose name is still on the door—with a sartorial contempt that fairly crackles. But it’s not just contempt for Trump that Musk is serving up. By extension, it’s a giant middle finger to the Presidency itself. Musk’s destructive spree across agencies and programs and his roving disregard for the law, Constitution, institutional knowledge, and history—everything but “shareholder value”—are Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality taken to its final, hellish conclusion. So there sat Trump, reduced to a prop in Elon’s alpha preening. It was a public notice to every White House staffer and every Trump factotum—Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and the rest of the bootlicking coterie — that Musk is running the show. Speaking of Susie Wiles, she’s been leaking stories for weeks now that she’s got Elon on a leash, that she’s in control, and that the White House knows everything DOGE and Elon are doing. Her Chief of Staff chops were a comfort to many Wall Street types, and now its revealed that she too is one of the NPCs in Elon’s virtual insanity. The media was on notice, too. Trump won’t call Elon to account for any of it; he’s too busy enjoying the illusions and distractions dangled by his staff, like a map of the “Gulf of America.” President Musk’s biggest whopper of his Oval Office presser centered on the so-called Department of Gooners and Edgelords (DOGE): “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and the DOGE website. We’re maximally transparent. I don’t think there’s been— I don’t know of any organization more transparent than the DOGE organization.” This is just industrial-grade, Trumpian gaslighting. The recent wave of court filings reveals only the tip of what could be the biggest data theft operation in American history and an illegal scheme to rewrite entire swaths of constitutional authority. As for DOGE’s alleged “transparency,” its online postings are a hot mess of MAGA rage-bait, slander, lies, and pure nonsense. It reeks of Musk’s modus operandi at Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX— mount the corporate operation like a parasitic wasp, engage in stochastic firings, reap government money, demand the world’s admiration, and see what sticks. Musk also stiff-armed the most straightforward question in the world: does his massive government income from SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla present a conflict of interest? Even Trump showed a flicker of awareness on this point, being the king of conflicts of interest until Elon snatched the crown. His response was a verbal middle finger. Let’s be clear: Elon Musk is not an engineer or a scientist. He’s a PayPal Mafia alumnus who got lucky, got rich, and has a ferocious hustle. He is not an auditor or a government expert. His superpower has always been a nose for acquisitions, but what you never see are the founders of the companies he took over. What you never see are the real engineers and coders behind the scenes unfucking his bad-idea factory. Admittedly, I respect a big-swing risk-taker, but he’s moved from risk-taking to risk-seeking. Now, however, the stakes aren’t Tesla’s stock price (sales are plunging, by the way, and markets only buy bullshit for so long) or whether Starship blows up on its next flight. The stakes are America’s Constitution, our economy, our place in the world, and human lives…and Musk simply doesn’t care. He’s doing this because he is relentlessly bored and doesn’t understand or value humans. He believes every system is amenable to his brand of chaos and mania. He enjoys the attention and the fun of being an arsonist. This is a man who openly owns Donald Trump. Thanks to his fortune, his stake in Trump’s political fate, and his bottomless bankroll, Elon can ward off even the handful of Republicans who haven’t gone entirely over the cliff. The mere threat of Musk dropping $25 million into someone’s primary is enough to turn them into supplicants. In short, they’ll end up performing the same humiliating ritual Trump just went through and smiling as they eat the big fecal sandwich. What’s next? The courts have had enough. They’re slamming the brakes on DOGE and Elon, and their decisions are revealing the ugly truth under the Twitter spin. Sanctions will follow, leading to the constitutional crisis we’ve been warning about. If Musk and Trump want to cut these programs and systems, there’s a simple way to do it legally: pass a bill in Congress. Put it down in black and white so the House and Senate can vote. They won’t, of course. Instead, the court fight is headed to the Supreme Court, and sanctions on Musk and his just-following-orders Elonjungen are coming sooner than later. Musk has already doxxed the daughter of one of the Treasury Department case judges, so that’s off to a good start. State AGs are revving their engines, and we’ll see what happens when the warrants start flying. There’s an easy scenario when California’s really stiff data privacy laws trigger a warrant for Elon. In the meantime, the most powerful man in the world stood in the Oval Office yesterday, dictating terms to his employees, his sycophants, and his monkey-butler-in-a-baggy-suit of a president. The scene was so cringeworthy that even in this era of relentless standards erosion, you could feel the shame radiating off Trump’s melted orange veneer. He might as well have been wearing a ball gag. Still, Trump, the ultimate puppet, is easily distracted. Hand him shiny models of the Trump Gaza Golfplex and Casino Towers IX and whisper sweet nothings about weekend golf, and he’s putty. And that, my friends, is how the “President” of the United States got thoroughly owned in his Oval Office by Elon Musk in a humiliating public display. 1 Glorbax_Rocketchild42069 isn’t the child’s real name, but given Musk’s naming conventions, it’s not that big a stretch.