Celebrity or Policy?

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

King Lear’s patrimonial cry might be something Donald Trump would quote, if his literary taste exceeded Where Is Baby’s Beach Ball? The President’s falling out with quirky business baron, space enthusiast, serial sperm shooter, and Twitter freebaser Elon Musk is time-transporting Trump back to his tabloid days. The tit-for-tat hit an inglorious crescendo when Musk, peeved over his ex-bosom companion’s refusal to accede to his policy advice, fingered the President for palling around with the late sex-slaver Jeffrey Epstein.

(We need a Godwin’s Law for every internet spat devolving into pederast accusations.)

Since the bro brouhaha, Musk has softened his stance towards his former confederate, erasing some imprudent tweets, offering, as all aggrieved repentants do, a 3AM mea culpa. Nobody knows whether Musk has been chastened trying to outwit the greatest living insult artist, or is worried about the state of his federal contracts, or maybe his ketamine stash is drying up. Jealousy, drugs, and dinero are a toxic cocktail for any man, dreamy rocketeer or terra-firma minded.

All the same, MAGAites didn’t waste any tears on Musk’s brief amble off the reservation. America Firsters have long figured a rupture was inevitable between their nativist champion and the immigrant entrepreneur who threw a choleric fit over a lack of H-1B visas back in January. Even if Musk’s infinite-scroll bankroll helped Trump win Pennsylvania (a highly dubious proposition—only D.C. sucubi spread the canard that money buys elections), the President’s allegiants weren’t about to start demanding a cost-relaxation on importing cheap brain-labor. Musk threw himself down a hill, and now must puff his way back up.

On the other side of the partisan divide, the left is paying little mind to its own turncoat. Karine Jean-Pierre, erstwhile White House press secretary and Joe Biden’s chief frass spinner, is declaring her liberation from the Democratic Party. As part of a PR-hatched hook for her West Wing memoir, Jean-Pierre is throwing more than a few stones, lambasting the Democratic Party for being full of liars, shysters, grifters, and perfidious profiteers, setting flame to a party too concerned about pronoun preference over take-home pay, goose-down pillow smothering its age-dulled leadership, jackhammering the concreted earth on which the DNC sits, imprecating a blight upon our Babylon on the Potomac.

Fooled ya! She mildly announced a change in her party registration from “D” to “I,” as in “independent,” as in wishy-washy fence-sitter. The attending outrage was just as boisterous and emotive, with all the afterclap volume of an ant falling onto grass. Alex Thompson, co-author of the Biden administration tell-all Original Sin, revealed that many of Jean-Pierre’s colleagues have long taken a less-than-dismal view of her job performance, which was to sell America the idea that Joe Biden was a vigorous, lucid president who did chin-ups in the Oval Office between chewing out tinpot dictators. Naturally, few of Jean-Pierre’s peers risked going on the record to say the equivalent that a first-grader hadn’t mastered advanced calculus.

One former staffer, however, did go as far as to tweet that Jean-Pierre’s watercooler workfellows regarded her “kinda dumb.” He quickly deleted the tweet after being slimed as a racist. Presumably, the woke police booked him for committing a hate crime, and he’s starving stark naked in D.C. dungeon.

In either case, Musk’s and Jean-Pierre’s about-face failed to accomplish their goals. Musk initially lashed out over the President’s signature legislation: a pork-packed behemoth of a spending bill that’d make Bismarck spucken his schnitzel. The funding bill has since passed the House of Representatives and, unless the Senate suddenly discovers a fiscal conscience that’s been missing for four decades, is on course to the Resolute Desk. Jean-Pierre’s concerns are more low-minded: hawking a 300-word, 5th-grade-level book about a brief adjacency to power. She needs a good news angle, a “Morning Joe” hit, and at least one Q&A night at Busboys and Poets to move copies. Instead, she was the target of cringey Fox News roundtable mockfests.

Both were counting on the force of their respective celebrity to nudge public opinion. But the American voter, so saturated with star intrigue, hardly raised an eyebrow, besides a few off-glances at CNN chyrons covering the palace intrigue. If Elon Musk had a quick change of heart, and started pouring his fortune into Gavin Newsom’s 2028 presidential bid, or Karine Jean-Pierre decided to go buy a million dollars’ worth of the latest Trump NFT and declare herself the new, improved “Dark MAGA,” not one ballot would change.

The American people, I dare suggest, actually care more about the underlying philosophy behind our two major parties than the maquillaged faces, whitening-stripped teeth, tailored couture, and thundering voices of those who constitute them.

An absurd suggestion, I know. But when has America not been an ideological ferment, bursting with absurd notions spouted by the most ordinary of people?