Here’s the problem with taking power: It’s up to you to run the thing that you are taking over. That is what Donald Trump and his followers and hangers on and cronies and fellow travelers face as we tick off the days until January 20. It isn’t even Day One yet, with Trump’s massively advertised plan to turn everything inside out with the stroke of his pen on a series of executive orders, and already the swamp-weasels are chewing on each other’s tails.
Have you been watching whatever is going on with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? The two of them, having billionaire-bulldozed their way into Trump’s inner circle, have discovered that it’s filled with fools and ignoramuses. And oh, my goodness! Who’s that over there in the mirror? Why it’s us!
It seems that the two billionaire geniuses failed to notify Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the MAGA faithful of their plan to continue running their own personal Department of Immigration for the Following People. We’re talking here of the H-1B visa program which allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers, supposedly when their skills are not available in the American workforce.
According to CNN, Musk’s Tesla corporation has sought and received permission to hire more than 2,000 foreign workers under the H-1B program, and so have two of his other businesses, X and Neuralink. According to the Department of Labor, in 2023 alone, Trump requested and received H-2B visas for non-skilled workers that included seven hotel desk clerks, 17 housekeeping cleaners, 53 waiters and waitresses, 24 cooks, five first-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers, and five bartenders.
Just couldn’t find any locals in Florida to change beds, swab out toilets, check-in guests, and prepare rubber chicken dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
So, Musk is all in with the H-1B program, posting this on X on Friday: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Let’s leave aside for the moment Musk’s plagiaristic usage of Trumpian “likes of which” language and his obvious elitist contempt for those attempting to read what he wrote and have a look at the fallout.
Miller and Bannon and Laura Loomer and a rather large smattering of what passes for the MAGA intelligentsia acted dumbstruck. What happened to what we might call “the whole immigration thing?” The idea that it’s time to “close the borders” and “hire American” and “America First” and practically every other slogan Trump ran on?
Trash heap of history, apparently.
So, now we know they’re against immigration but for it when it comes to exploiting low skilled and highly skilled foreign workers both for their personal companies and the companies of their cronies. What else is on the menu?
They’re against shipping jobs off to Mexico and Indonesia and India and Pakistan except when their friends own the companies doing the out-sourcing. They’re against vaccinations except for themselves and their children. They’re against the NIH and egghead scientists except when they come down with diseases like pancreatic cancer for which there are now designer mRNA vaccines that can be customized for individual patients who can afford them. They’re against women in combat until they need female soldiers to question and search female prisoners of war and gain intelligence from women in Muslim countries who are forbidden from even speaking with a man who is not their husband.
And of course they’re against abortion, except when an inconvenient pregnancy crops up in their own lives. Take for example arch-conservative Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, who pressured his mistress to get an abortion and arranged and paid for two abortions for his wife, according to transcripts from his divorce proceedings…according to the wife who had the two abortions.
It's only the beginning. Just wait until Trump gets going on “drill, baby, drill” on public lands. There will be whining and pissing and moaning and even lawsuits from right-wing billionaires whose zillion dollar ranches back up on national forests and public grazing lands. Trump’s plans to cancel tax credits for electric cars and solar panels are already running up against…you guessed it…Elon Musk, who sells electric cars and batteries that store power produced by home solar panels.
The entire Trump plan for his second presidency is based on cancelling fairness – in employment, college admissions, distribution of funds for disaster relief and basic programs like agriculture subsidies, school breakfasts and lunches, healthcare, and that’s just for starters. They’ve got Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in their gunsights, too.
What happens when fairness goes out the door? Why, it’s replaced with cronyism, payoffs, nepotism, corruption right up to and including bribery and blackmail. Remember how Trump burned through cabinet secretary scandals in the opening months and years of his first term? Buckle your seatbelts. The crew he has nominated this time are a whole new category of horror-story.
We’re in for quite a ride.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.
