The Rachel Maddow Show
Sidelined Trump mostly 'decorative' as Musk remains busy wrecking the government, reaping rewards
Sat, 22 Feb 2025
Rachel Maddow notes that while Donald Trump golfs and performs stunts for TV cameras, Elon Musk is hard at work on the project of dismantling the U.S. government. And even though Musk's behavior is so poorly received it is hurting business for his car company, his business interests broadly are reaping rewards from the very government he is destroying.
How is Elon Musk influencing the U.S. government?
Happy Friday. There is so much to talk about tonight. There is so much to cover. When we had our news meeting this afternoon, we had enough news in the like things we could put on the show column to do 17 shows. But naturally, because it's me, I've got to start with something weird. All right.
When the new president decided to hand over a big part of running the government to his largest campaign donor, that meant, inevitably, that the United States government would soon start doing lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of work. favors for that campaign donor and his businesses and taking government action against his business rivals, etc. It was very easy to predict.
It is a dynamic that is as old as time, and so we're going to talk about some of that tonight. But in addition to that donor being invited into the government and then the government starting to do things for the donor and his businesses, turns out it also cuts in the opposite direction as well in terms of what the public gets to say about this arrangement.
Because if you think about it, what we've got now, thanks to Donald Trump essentially ceding his presidency to his top campaign donor, what we've got now is somebody who really does appear to be mostly running the government, somebody who's definitely destroying big parts of the government, but he's doing those things.
He's taking that incredibly, incredibly controversial, destructive government role while he simultaneously is also running a bunch of companies. including the big one that accounts for most of his fortune, a company that is very much a public-facing company, not just in the stock market, but also in terms of storefronts and the nation's roads.
That dynamic, the fact that he is taking this government role, this incredibly controversial and destructive government role, while he is also the CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla, the car company, that has turned out to provide a quite unique opportunity for public feedback on his actions in the government.
Did you know that the tailgate of a Tesla Cybertruck is a perfectly flat, light colored, sharp edged rectangle? Basically, it's a projector screen. If you have a projector and you shine the projector at the tailgate, it works really well, like it's a screen.
Road and Track Magazine today highlights a new effort that's been taking shape on TikTok this week, in which people are apparently driving around at night, at night is crucial for the projector part of this, driving around at night looking for Tesla Cybertrucks. And then they project things on the tailgate, like this one, Tesla Cybertruck, the most recalled truck in 2024.
projected on the back of that truck. And there's a bunch of these that are way too crude for me to show on television, but they are circulating widely on TikTok. Some of them have millions of views already. This one says, no, the price of eggs aren't falling, but the price of this piece of junk sure is. And then the K falls off the junk. This one says, hey, don't hate me. Musk sold me this S-Box.
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