The Brooklyn Rail

US stock markets are falling like a stone, because of the trade wars driven by Trump’s excessive tariffs on our two contiguous neighbors, one of which he is threatening to annex as a 51^st state. The S&P 500 lost $4 trillion in market value. Nasdaq just had its worst day since September 2022. On January 20, Trump inherited an economy that was the envy of the world. In only seven weeks, he has turned a bull market into a bear market. Asked about a recession, Trump demurs. The last time GDP was shrinking this fast was because of the Covid pandemic. At that time, a disease caused the downturn. This time, Trump is the disease.

Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and corporations will add $800 billion to the deficit, and whatever DOGE lops off is not going to affect that very much. They’re trying to break the government so they can take it over and wipe it out so that it can’t come back.

The repeated assurances by Trump during the campaign that nothing was going to happen to Social Security were given the lie by his recent claims that Social Security is riddled with fraud and abuse, echoing his chainsaw man, Elon Musk. They’ve already laid off 2,500 people and say they will eliminate half of the workforce. Bernie Sanders has been saying all along that the oligarchs’ goal is to privatize all government services—the Post Office, NASA, the VA, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and give them to billionaires. That does look to be the plan.

The former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Martin O’Malley, said on March 1, “Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days . . . people should start saving now.”

Elon Musk told Joe Rogan on his podcast on February 28 that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Then, on March 10, Musk told Larry Kudlow on Fox Business that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all “needed to be eliminated.” “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said. “So that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe six, 700 billion a year.” Then he gave his explanation for why the Democrats support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said that Democrats lure immigrants to come here with these programs and then turn them into Democratic voters. “Democrats will fight cuts because they will lose voters,” said Musk.

First of all, Social Security and Medicare are not actually “entitlements,” in terms of handouts. Working people pay into them their entire working lives, so the money coming back to them in retirement is their own money, and they need that money to survive in old age. This is something the richest person in the world is never going to understand. Second, immigrants do pay into Social Security and Medicare, but they never get their money back because they’re not eligible for benefits. Third, immigrants (non-citizens) can’t vote. Naturalized citizens can vote.

So, Musk’s rationale for eliminating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is based on utter falsehoods. And he is about to find out that Americans, including and especially MAGA Americans, are very protective of these programs, and if he does what he is now threatening to do, he will face their wrath.

On March 10, Tesla stock fell 15%, losing $16 billion in one day, making it the worst-performing stock in the S&P this year. The Tesla Chainsaw Massacre. Even Trump turning the driveway in front of the White House into a Tesla showroom (“Everything is computer!”) isn’t going to help.

Musk also told Joe Rogan that AI would be smarter than any individual in the next year or two, and it would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030. He said there is an 80% chance that AI will have a “good outcome,” and a 20% chance of “annihilation.” When Bill Gates was asked by Anderson Cooper if he was afraid of AI, Gates said yes. But he also said that he thinks the first 5–10 years of the AI revolution are going to be mainly positive. After 10 years, it could be catastrophic.

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Musk, says that his first name came from the novel Project Mars, written by Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist and early proponent of a human mission to Mars. In his novel, Von Braun described the political system of his Martian colony in this way:

The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of who was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.

Fintan O’Toole writes in the New York Review of Books:

In the [von Braun] novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more novel organism.”

The DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Isaacson that during a visit to the SpaceX factory after the two men met in 2012, Musk explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.” The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself.¹

Elon Musk wants Trump to help him get to Mars. And to get him into the front line of AI. AI is going to change everything in the next period, and who controls that is going to be largely decided in the next couple of years.

In a series of Bluesky posts on February 15, Mark Cuban ruminated about this coming battle:

The greatest business battle EVER to be fought will come when President Elon starts trying to implement AI for federal processes. The battle will be fought over which company’s AI will be used by the feds. This is a zero sum battle that will create more chaos than this country has ever seen.

This is a zero sum game and the exact reason every tech bro has kissed the ring. We are talking about TRILLIONS IN MARKET CAP. Meta, ELon, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. will have to do everything they can afford to do in an effort to win at least part of the business.

Will Musk last in the Trump White House long enough to see this through? As much of the US population and almost all of its elected representatives seem mesmerized by the Trump takeover of the government and Musk’s determined dismantling of it, some lawmakers in Europe are more clear-eyed. French center-right senator Claude Malhuret offered an eight-minute speech in the French Senate on March 4 that included these lines:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. . . .

Never in history has a US President capitulated to the enemy. Never has any one of them supported an aggressor against an ally . . . trampled on the US Constitution, issued so many illegal executive orders, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military senior staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.

This not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy.²

Malcolm Nance is an intelligence and foreign policy analyst. He joined the Ukrainian Foreign Legion in March 2022 to fight the Russians in Ukraine. In his “Special Intelligence” posting on Substack on March 8, under the title, “URGENT WARNING: Trump is Planning to Invade Canada and Greenland,” he wrote:

The Trump administration has apparently made a strategic decision to execute a long-planned campaign to expand the United States to encompass all of North America and the Northwestern Atlantic. Though they have openly discussed buying or annexing Greenland, virtually all of his cabinet members apparently were instructed to stridently parrot President Donald Trump's statements referring to Canada as the 51^st state. These statements are assessed to be part of a deliberate political warfare campaign against our northern neighbor to destabilize it in a leadup to armed annexation. . . .

Trump’s plan reflects the technological imperialist/monarchist plans of Elon Musk’s Neo-Reactionary (NRx) “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy. NRx is a belief that democracy must be eliminated and the country run under a corporatist, technological dictatorship and their belief that massive quantities of natural resources will be necessary to harness the economy needed for advanced technologies … to go to Mars. Traditional oligarchs want to exploit the earth's resources without restraint and regulation. With Trump, the oligarch’s dreams of economic and cultural domination of the West, removing sanctions against Russia, and allowing Musk to automate government with Artificial Intelligence is coming true.