Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/01/elon-musk-donald-trump

Timothy Snyder says world’s richest man is likely to exert uncomfortable influence over White House

Allies and aides to Donald Trump should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on the US president-elect, the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder said.

“Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” Snyder said. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

The author of bestsellers including On Tyranny (2017) and On Freedom (2024) was speaking to the Guardian about issues including his work in Ukraine, where he has teamed up with the Star Wars actor Mark Hamill to raise funds to buy robots to clear landmines laid by Russian invaders.

But as Trump prepares to take power in Washington, and promises new policy on US support for Ukraine most expect to heavily favor Vladimir Putin and Russia, Snyder also considered what the coming Trump administration may mean closer to home.

Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man.

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As owner of businesses including Tesla, SpaceX and X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), Musk poured millions of dollars into supporting Trump in his presidential election campaign against the Democratic nominee, the current vice-president, Kamala Harris. Musk was widely reported to have been a key influence in Trump naming the Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick.

Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “Doge”, a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending.

Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans – an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund – Snyder said: “All the threats that Trump is now going to issue – ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’ – Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.

“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

Trump’s view of Russia has been a controversial subject ever since he entered presidential politics in 2015; won the White House in 2016 with Russian interference on his behalf; spent two years having his links to Moscow investigated by the special counsel Robert Mueller; and was widely criticized in office for appearing to defer to Vladimir Putin.

In light of such concerns, Snyder – whose 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom was in large part about Trump and Russia – discussed a name for the incoming, second Trump administration that he recently coined.

“So I thought about this dependency position,” Snyder said. “I was going to call it Muskotrumpovia, because I think Musk is a more important person, but Trumpomuskovia had a nicer ring to it.

“And also, I wanted Muskovia because I wanted the idea of Russia to be there in the background, because a lot of smart Russia hands are saying this all the time: this is kind of like the 1990s in Russia. You have the doddering, rich-but-not-very-rich president [Boris Yeltsin], surrounded by more youthful, more active, ambitious oligarchs. That’s the kind of scenario [America is] in.”

Trumpomuskovia

Trump is not weak shit like Biden and Obama were and are.   So keep believing the propaganda  BS you put on site.    Better start thinking about the real shit you believe in anyway.    The way the  USA  were going they would have been a sattelite of China in four  years time.       .     .

A New Name for a New Regime

Trumpomuskovia is a word I introduced in an essay about some historical moments that might help us to understand the coming reality. Some of you asked why. Here are five reasons.

1. Novelty. We need a new name for the coming regime because we need to recognize the novelty of the situation -- legally, structurally, and morally.

A new constitutional regime is emerging, in which the Supreme Court has tried to place a single individual above the law, and in so doing has purported to void a section of the Constitution (the Insurrection Clause, section three of the Fourteenth Amendment).

We are already in a power structure in which money has displaced citizenry. We now have people in power who no longer pretend to care about votes and elections. The sitting president tried to overthrow the previous presidential election. His co-ruler, Elon Musk, spent more on the last campaign than all of the small donors put together. He and other oligarchs chose the vice-president.

Not just Trump but Musk believe they can simply threaten Americans with persecution and violence. Both use language that is redolent of fascism to define Americans as enemies deserving of punishment.

2. Personalism. Part of the novelty is the prominence of the two personalities. This is why the regime should bear the personal names "Musk" and "Trump."

Never before have people been bombarded with as much propaganda about two potential rulers as in the case of Musk and Trump. Both men are influencers with social media platforms. They both seem to believe that it is their personality that entitles them to rule. Trump, after all, tried to keep power even after losing an election in 2020. His team was preparing to contest the results in 2024. Given these habits and this attitude, he cannot regard himself as representing anything other than himself.

And Musk, of course, was not elected at all. He spent an invisibly tiny fraction of his huge wealth on bribes for Trump voters, demoralization ads for Harris voters, and other support. He can't feel that he owes voters anything, since he came to power without anyone voting for him. And, given that the amount of money he spent was meaningless to him personally, he can hardly respect Trump voters for having been swayed by it.

Uzbekistan is named after a Mongol raider. Mozambique is named after a wealthy trader. Russia is named after medieval slavers who captured and sold the common people. We should consider a name for an American regime that recognizes the centrality of exploitation. And thus Trumpomuskovia.

3. Russia Why the "Muskovia" part of "Trumpomuskovia"? It is Musk's name, of course. But it is also a name for Russia, and this is an association we need. The Ukrainians call Russia "Moscovia," which corresponds to the name one will find, for example, on the most famous seventeenth-century map of the region. The historical name in English was "Muscovy.

Muskovia" in "Trumpomuskovia" recalls a few essential connections to the current Putin regime. The first is that Musk himself is a Putinist. He communicates regularly with Putin. For two years he has repeated Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. (The same is true of his fellow South African oligarch, David Sachs, who has been named to a position of responsibility in Trumpomuskovia. Sachs is a relentlessly humorless Putinist known for his social media transcriptions of Russian war propaganda. His Putinism is so literal that he managed to get himself booed at the Republican National Convention.)

And, of course, Trump's public record thus far has been one of submission to Putin. He has trained his followers to speak of a "Russia hoax," and will try to appoint Kash Patel as head of the FBI precisely to punish everyone who notes that Putin has supported Trump and his presidential campaigns. But Trump's efforts suppress only confirm the basic truth: Putin strongly preferred Trump over Clinton, Biden, and Harris, and acted to bring his preference to life. The Russian internet videos supporting Trump and the dozens of bomb threats on election day were just the brazen and most recent examples of a continuing campaign.

4. Oligarchy. The stronger connection to Russia, though, is a resemblance to the 1990s, which also suggests the name Trumpomuskovia.

Russia's recent history of oligarchy and dictatorship offers some suggestions as to how Trumpomuskovia might evolve. Like Trump today, Boris Yeltsin after the Russian elections of 1996 was an aging president who owed both his election and his stature to the oligarchs around him. (We have the word "oligarchy" from the ancient Greeks, for whom it meant "rule by the few"; its present meaning, "rule by the wealthy few" we owe to Russia in the 1990s.) Yeltsin's term was a contest for power among oligarchs, who saw themselves as the true and correct holders of power. As Yeltsin become ever more incapable of holding the responsibilities of power, the oligarchs undertook what they called "Operation Successor," a search for a replacement for Yeltsin who would seem plausible to Russians but who would do their bidding. Their choice, Vladimir Putin, did not pan out as they expected; he used the power of the state to dominate them and to become the chief plutocrat.

In the current U.S. setting, our regime-proximate oligarchs have chosen J.D. Vance as the successor. To be sure, we can't know exactly what will happen next, since these oligarchical clusters depend upon impulsive and willful personalities. Perhaps Trump will look ever more like Yeltsin and his allies of today will be nudging him aside tomorrow. Perhaps Vance will play the role that Putin was supposed to play, and serve the oligarchical masters. Or perhaps Vance will behave more like Putin, inheriting Trump's mantle and then using state power to change the regime. Or perhaps Trump will see the structure of the situation, and try himself to overturn his own debts to Musk and rule without the oligarchs whispering in his ears al day long. And of course we cannot forget Putin himself, who has a strange hold over Trump, and whom Trump seems to want to rescue from his various follies. In oligarchy, all that is certain is the uncertainty. I considered these variants and others in other posts.

5. Instability. The word "Trumpomuskovia," with its length and awkward accents (like "Czechoslovakia") is meant to suggest the inherent weakness of the new regime. New things are unstable. Personal politics are unstable. The Russia of the 1990s was unstable. Oligarchies in general are unstable.

Dictatorships are unstable — as Syria has just reminded us. Trump will likely try to save Putin, just as Putin once tried to save Assad. But, in the end, all of that will fail.

In the short run, can Trump and Musk stick together? In some sense, it would seem that they have to, since Trump needs Musk's money and Musk needs Trump's hand signing away power to him.

How can they separate, and the Trumpomuskovite regime break?

There are at least three scenarios. The first is that the oligarchs and the current president and the designated successor fight amongst themselves until some new structure emerges. The second is that Musk and the other oligarchs succeed in weakening the federal government to such an extent that there is no longer anything for Trump to dominate.

The third is that the Trumpomuskovian designated deputies of destruction -- people like Hesgeth, Gabbard, and Patel -- are actually nominated, confirmed by the Senate, take office in the highest positions of national defense, intelligence, and policing; and then do what they are supposed to do. If we actually do see an America of intelligence collapse (Gabbard), extralegal persecutions of designation internal enemies (Patel), and "holy war" against immigrants and others (Hegseth), the risk for Musk is that the country will fall apart in such a way that it will be hard for him to become a trillionaire. American deconstruction is a process that Musk will want to curate himself, and so here his interests can diverge from Trump's.

In serious times it is important to be creative, because we need the creativity for concepts, and we need the concepts to see the facts before us. Trumpomuskovia is the coming reality, and the word gives us some angles of view.

The better we see the new regime, the more clearly we might also see its fractures and weaknesses. Analysis is the first step to action, and analysis begins with the words. I hope that you find this one useful.

Pres

The real situation is the fac that the Democratic Party in the USA is in a chaotic situation based on the ultra-lftist running the Party at present.    The USA voters are not prepaed to become a dictorship uder communist rule yet, so the media must find a wa to distort the situation by sing stories to discredit Tump who is determined  to remove bribery and corruption coupled with incompetence from the Federal Public Serice and that is also a threat to polticians invovled in that category.

The ultra-left media is determined to stop that policy of Trump - who are appointing people that will help him to stop the rot and remove criminals from the US Federal burueaucracy and heir political partners.   So the media are using diesion lies to attack especially Musk and Ramaswamy Trump appinted to help him to clean up the mess that is costing the USA trillions of dolars every year,   So all the emdia has is to launch unfounded BS and brainwashed idiots fall for it,    The only thing  that is certain is that further assassintion attemts on Trump and Vance is inevtable.    The only thing that is how that would be organized  and by whom it would be carried out over the next three weeks.

All tha ahs been established as that the firt two attempt were done by organiztions linked to the CIA - so hw ould the next ttempts would be done.   That is why I do not beleive the army spin about the drone epidemic that hit the USA since 15 November 2024.   EWhy did it started nd ho is behind it and why si the DOD lying about it by saying hey do not know who is reponsible - but they do know it si nt dangerous.    I think the next attempt would involve drones and that is where the CIA and DOD would be involved in directly,   So all of Trump, Vnce, Musk and Ramaswami must be eliminated because it endang r senior elements in teh DOD and CIA, as well as the FBI.     Tat is why hey fear that Trump will declassify all docuents relating to the assassination of the Kennedy borthers in the 1960's and the two attempts thus far on his own life.    That is why the Florida Government will not allow the CIA nd FBI to get to the  assasinating attempt in Florida and the said Govenrment only said it were organized attempts in both cases,    But who were invovled in organizing both the attempts?   Declassifying both attempts will lead to exposure of elements wihin the present  federal government set-up being exposed and that must be prevented at all costs.   

So al the leftist media has bee at present and that is spinning  BS like that BB posted in this threat.     .

BB 

Both  Pengelly and S nyder ae conrtributors to The Gaurdian - that used to be the Communist supporting regimes in the world and still do.   The paper is just spreading propaganda shit and Stav, DBB and Denny use articles The Guardian publishes as being true - it adheres totally to the Commnist creed hey support all out.   Nothing the Guardian publish ar enever factual ever.