How Can Biden End the Musk Presidency?

Elon Musk will be the shadow president beginning in January

Original image of Trump by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Original image of Musk by The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; image manipulation by author, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Most of the 74 million people who voted for Kamala Harris are aware that there’s something seriously wrong with Trump. Whatever it is hasn’t been officially diagnosed, but his symptoms were clear to anyone who watched more than five minutes of his long, meandering speeches or heard his spite-filled word salads in interviews.

The Trump transition team will release short (the shortest ever) videos showing how in charge he is, but a different truth is emerging. Someone as daffled¹ as Donny is easily influenced. This has been true since the first emperors started wearing new clothes thousands of years ago.

Harris voters aren’t the only ones who are aware of Trump’s deteriorating mental acuity.

Per an Axios newsletter I received this morning:

Elon Musk, the most powerful and persistent voice in President-elect Trump's ear, has been relentless in pushing "radical reform" of, well, almost everything. As he sits next to Trump discussing administration picks, Musk often asks if the person embodies "radical reform" — massive cuts and blow-it-up-to-rebuild instincts.

The result of Musk’s influence is a pile of incomprehensible cabinet picks. For example: Kash Patel as FBI director.

If you’re not familiar with Patel, he has said he wants to dismantle FBI headquarters and turn it into a “museum of the deep state,” according to a CNN video interview.²

When I was a young political rebel, I might have cheered such a thing. But we all know what it means under the incoming administration: A serious effort will be made to round up career agents and cull them in favor of agents who pass a fascist litmus test.

A typical interview question for new agents might look like this: “Are you willing to arrest a foreign national first and ask questions later? Are you willing to detain them as long as necessary during an investigation?”

On the surface, Patel looks like the perfect American immigrant story.³

After receiving his Juris Doctor from Pace University, he was a public defender for eight years in Florida. Sadly, however, rather than develop a socially responsible attitude toward his fellow humans during that period, Florida apparently rubbed off on him, and he became a stereotypical Florida Man.

Florida Patel Man was hidden from view for a few years as he took on a role as legal liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command and, later, as senior counsel on counterterrorism for the House Intelligence Committee.

Somewhere along the road, he encountered Trump sycophant David Nunes, another Florida Man, who now runs the media company behind the Apartheid Twitter clone, Truth Social Sociopath. Nunes is infamous for being a one-man blocking crew against investigations trying to determine if Russia helped swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.⁴

For Nunes, Patel wrote what is generally known as the Nunes Memo. This was a four-page document that accused the FBI of politically motivated investigations against Trump and became a cornerstone to the MAGA deep lie ecosphere.

The memo was designed to be an internal memo but Russian bots on Apartheid Twitter flooded the social network with #ReleaseTheMemo hashtags in 2018.⁵

Trump subsequently forced the memo’s release and managed to get a Democratic rebuttal redacted by claiming concern over classified statements within the rebuttal. That may seem funny in light of his classified documents case⁶, but Democrats, as usual, relented and released the redacted document.

This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to force Patel onto the FBI. He tried in 2021, too. Attorney General William Barr, who was a recalcitrant Trump sycophant the more he became exposed to Trump’s lawlessness, somewhat famously told the White House Chief of Staff that Patel would become FBI director "over his dead body."⁷

In a way, though, it’s fair to say that the real problem with Patel potentially becoming FBI Director isn’t even Patel. It’s the concept of replacing the existing FBI director, Fred Wray, before his ten-year term expires.

The position of FBI Director has traditionally been a non-partisan position. That’s why they get ten-year terms. Part of the idea behind this is so that they can lead investigations into the existing administration. Now that the Supreme Court has scuttled presidential accountability by granting a sitting president full immunity over his actions as president, this may seem like a moot point. But Trump’s administration will be full of vipers who have no immunity. Trump’s installation of a Viper in Chief ruins any chance of accountability if Patel is okayed by the Senate.⁸

One of the reasons the Hitler regime grew exponentially in a short time was the hearty willingness to place criminals into positions of law enforcement. If you were a murderer, you were a perfect candidate for the Gestapo. It’s not hard to imagine a similar law enforcement landscape growing in America under Patel, who has plunged headfirst into Trump’s bizarre world of paranoia and grievance.

Patel is just one of a handful of crackpots chosen for Trump’s cabinet. Luckily, they all require Senate approval, but, given that the Senate has a Republican majority, that is small comfort.

There’s former Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth, who, according to his own mother, is a reprehensible misogynist. She wrote this in an April 30, 2018 email to her son:

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself.

“I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.

“You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”⁹

Trump wants Hegseth to be his Defense Secretary.

He wants RFK Jr. to become Secretary of Health and Human Services. Stories about RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccination efforts are legion, but just today, the New York Times served up another doozy.¹⁰ The subhead for the article sums it up:

The health secretary pick and his organization have worked around the world to undermine longstanding policies on measles, AIDS and more.

Most well-reasoned folks consider RFK Jr. and his embedded brainworm a walking extinction-level event waiting to happen.

But Musk cheered on the appointment with gusto.

Musk did the same with Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice as director of national intelligence. Gabbard, who was once a darling of the progressive left, gabs frequently about various conspiracies, but some also consider her no less than a Russian mole. No matter what you believe, she, like the others, isn’t qualified to direct the operations of anything much more complicated than a kids’ lemonade stand.

Elon Musk’s attack on America

Elon Musk is barred from the presidency because he doesn’t qualify as a naturalized citizen.

So, Musk is doing the next best thing. He’s attaching his lips to the ears of a man who is much more easily influenced than most Americans realize. The major reason that Musk can influence Trump is the disease that has seized Trump’s brain. Nobody has insight into a formal definition of his disease because no diagnosis will ever be made. We are left to guess based on what we observe. Is it a form of dementia? This seems likely, according to many psychiatrists.

The situation is so dangerous that one of the government agencies that will be turned over to Kennedy Jr if the Senate doesn’t intervene, The National Institutes of Health, features a review of a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President: Assessing Dangerousness.¹¹

The review concludes with:

Some chapters are brilliantly clear, others less so, but this doesn’t detract from the consensus: Trump poses a great danger to the future of humanity and the planet.

A chilling read.

Posing as a danger to the future of humanity and the planet is a feature, not a bug, for Elon Musk, who is close to achieving a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency.

Unlike Trump, who never even managed to build that big wall, Musk seems capable of enacting grand plans. A few of us knew when he bought Twitter that he’d quickly transform it into Apartheid Twitter.

The general consensus regarding Musk’s takeover of Twitter was that it was just a tech bro power grab. Nothing to see here. Some of us knew better.

As I wrote in December 2022 for the Medium version of Ruminato:

Now that he has control of the world’s town square, he’s proven that you can take the apartheid out of the country, but you can’t take the apartheid out of the man.¹²

The takeover of Twitter was part of a planned attack. It was successful. Musk now controls the largest social network of opinion, comment, and news in the world, and is leveraging it to forward his agenda.

And now, his lips are permanently attached to Trump’s ear. He’ll probably have his tech bro minions build a Neuralink for Trump, too, so that Musk can control him remotely. If you don’t think that’s possible, may I ask where you’ve been these past eight years of crazy?

An elderly man who is in late-stage dementia is easy to control and manipulate, even if he has a past of being a loudmouthed bully. All Musk needs to do is pay occasional homage when it makes sense, and relentlessly whisper into his ear. It helps that Musk is one of the few people in the world that Trump admires.

What can Biden do to end the Musk presidency before it begins?

Technically, the answer is that Biden can pretty much do whatever he wants. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Biden has full immunity to order a hit on Musk as long as it is an official act.

He won’t (and shouldn’t) do that. But if Biden hasn’t pieced together a team looking at options somewhere in between doing that and doing nothing (which seems to be his administration’s go-to when it comes to Trump (Musk) malfeasance), he’s at risk of destroying what still has the potential to be an impressive legacy.

The potential for that lasting legacy fades every day we get closer to January 20.

What options, then, does he have?

He could begin by stripping Musk of any security clearances he has, even though Trump will give them right back after his inauguration.

Biden could also order his Department of Justice to fast-track any investigations into Trump or Musk that may be sitting in one of the many piles of legal papers the department has collected on the two over the years. If the DOJ can find even the flimsiest of reasons to deport Musk, Biden should do it post-haste to get Musk’s mouth out of Trump’s ear before the inauguration. It would have helped if he had done this before Trump nominated all the crazies.

Most importantly, we can be assured of this: Trump has committed more crimes than we know at the federal level. We can also be assured that the Department of Justice has uncovered some. To save the country, and itself, the DOJ should arrest Trump for these, and push through a speedy trial that challenges the narrative that Trump deserves to occupy the Oval Office on January 20.

I suspect that the legal beagles I admire here on Substack, folks like Joyce Vance and Jay Kuo, would laugh at this last idea’s impossible notion. That’s fine.

So target Musk instead. And hurry. Time’s almost up. The people who voted for Trump didn’t vote for a Musk shadow presidency. If Trump must plunge the nation into autocracy and madness, let’s be sure he’s the one behind it, not a tech bro with a broken brain.

1. I made that word up, so don’t bother Googling it.

2

“Hear Kash Patel’s Plans for the FBI.” 2024. CNN. December 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/01/politics/video/donald-trump-kash-patel-fbi-director-retributions-digvid.

3. From a Wikipedia entry:

Kashyap "Kash" Patel was born in 1980 in Garden City, New York, to Gujarati Indian parents who had immigrated to the United States from East Africa, via Canada. His father worked for an aviation firm as a financial officer. Patel graduated from Garden City High School on Long Island. Patel was raised as a Hindu, and has said that he has always had a "very deep" connection with India. Patel received a degree in criminal justice and history from the University of Richmond in 2002. He received a certificate in international law from University College London in 2004, and earned a Juris Doctor from Pace University School of Law in 2005.

4. Devin Nunes. (2024, November 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_Nunes

5. Nunes memo. (2024, November 7). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunes_memo‌

6. What’s also funny, if you’re capable of laughing at all this nefarious nonsense, is that Patel invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked to testify in the Trump classified document case.

7. Frum, David. 2024. “The Atlantic.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic. December 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/trumps-fbi-kash-patel/680840/.

8. To stay current on resistance to appointments and take advantage of an existing, easy-to-use letter-writing infrastructure opposing Trump appointments, check out The Dworkin Report. As of this writing, Scott hadn’t yet set up a letter against the Patel nomination, but he will shortly, so keep an eye out there or subscribe to his newsletter.

9. Thompson, David. 2024. “Pete Hegseth’s Mom Said He Abused ‘Many’ Women in Bombshell Email.” The Daily Beast. November 30, 2024. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-hegseths-mom-said-he-abused-many-women-in-bombshell-email/.

10. Gebrekidan, Selam, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes, and Pete McKenzie. 2024. “How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. November 30, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/world/africa/rfk-jr-kennedy-international-work-public-health-policies.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE4.cH_P.9RKx2GWwg_GL&smid=url-share (free link)

11. The review of the book can currently be found on the NIH website. It won’t remain there, obviously, much long after January 20. Field, R. (2018). Books: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President: Assessing Dangerousness. The British Journal of General Practice, 68(675), 490. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp18X699269

12. Bastille, Charles. 2022. “That Stench You Smell Is Musk - Ruminato - Medium.” Medium. Ruminato. December 16, 2022. https://medium.com/ruminato/that-stench-you-smell-is-musk-55450b90744c?sk=0718598806004dde65713bcccc7f03d7 (free link, no Medium subscription required).