IT'S OBVIOUS what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing-- old-fashioned 1940-style blitzkrieg, like when Germany invaded France, moving swiftly and gobbling up territory. Merely a variation of the tech bros mantra of "move fast and break things," only this time applied to politics.
The idea being to move faster than your set-in-its-ways opponent can think. For Trump and Musk, it's been a scandalous break-the-rules, outrage-the-Democrats every day, from dismantling federal agencies to raising tariffs on friendly nations to insulting allies. Democrats are stunned. What happened to their clubby world? Like the French general staff in 1940 (young Charles De Gaulle excepted), they're fighting the last war, not this one. What they feel they need is time to discuss the matter before moving. Before doing anything. Maybe this and maybe that. Maybe if they do nothing and cross their fingers, Trump will collapse. Yet his entire movement and his 45-day second administration thrives on action, including change or at least the appearance of change.
In 1940, while most of the French army froze or fled, De Gaulle kept his head and organized his own tank-based assault-- against the blitzkrieg. It worked on a limited scale, only enough to serve as a lesson of how to respond. For the left, now, in the United States, the response should be: Attack! Against Trump-Musk weak points.
I'll mention one: the wildly overvalued Tesla Motors stock price, upon which much of the richest-man-on-the-planet's wealth-- and myth-- is based. Indeed, keeping that stock-price bubble inflated is a large motivation for Musk's entry into the federal government, to gut federal agencies that investigate and regulate companies like his.
Needed: report upon report revealing safety problems with his cars, and about the endless broken promises from Musk about everything from potential sales to the benefits and possibilities of so-called Full Self Driving. That's his weak point. The stock price will plummet at some date in the future, and reveal him for the huckster he is, or has become. But why wait?
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