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Trump Revealed His Elon Musk Model Of Governing During His First Run In July 2016 [1]
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Date: 2025-02-25
So, Donald Trump wins the presidency and places some random guy (Elon Miusk) in charge of the executive branch - running the federal government, attending any and all meetings, and directing domestic and foreign policies far and wide. Who could have seen this happening?
Well, actually, Trump already expressed his lack of competence and interest in actually governing back during his first campaign for the presidency. I wrote about this in a July 2016 diary titled “I Can’t Believe This NYT Article About Trump Is Not a Bigger Story/Scandal.” The NYT reporting was astonishing:
One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March that Trump was “really not prepared to be president of the United States,” and the following month he took the highly unusual step of coordinating with his rival Senator Ted Cruz in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history? When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of? “Making America great again” was the casual reply.
Kasich’s camp’s statement was consistent with the Trump campaign’s own statements:
Manafort sat down with the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman for a fairly long interview , and while the two covered quite a bit of ground, there was one exchange in particular that stood out for me. The vice presidential pick will also be part of the process of proving he’s ready for the White House, Manafort said. “He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He sees himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.”
See also Steve Bennen in 2016: “There are presidential duties Trump 'doesn't want to do': Day-to-day governing and overseeing the executive branch are apparently the parts of the presidency Donald Trump "doesn't want to do."
All of this is obviously important in understanding where we are today. We have a 78 plus year old who wasn’t up to the presidential job eight years ago. Contrary to his manufactured myth as an “incredible energy” guy, even back in 2018 Trump did not show up to work each day until 11 am, and then spent most of his day watching cable news until quitting for dinner at 6 pm. Trump already has spent 9 of his first 30 days in his second term golfing, at a tax payer cost of $10.7 million.
I looked back on what I wrote in my original 2016 diary, and frankly this was not hard to predict:
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