Musk's 7 reasons

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk offers seven reasons why he's voting for Trump:

1. @ElonMusk was astounded when Trump fist-pumped and shouted, “Fight!” shortly after getting shot in the face. “You can’t feign bravery in a situation like that,” he said.
2. Musk seeks a leader “who is strong and courageous to represent the country.”
3. He wants someone tough to deal with world leaders who are pretty tough themselves. “Poor guy [Biden] has trouble climbing a flight of stairs, and the other one’s [fist-pumping] after getting shot. This is no comparison.”
4. Musk wants “a secure border. We don’t have a secure border.”
5. He wants someone who can deliver “safe and clean cities.”
6. Musk thinks Trump is the better candidate to reduce spending. He’s concerned about this issue because “we’re currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country.”
7. Musk aligns with Trump’s vision to cut bureaucratic bloat. He wants someone who will “reduce the size of government.”

I'm looking at these reasons and generally agreeing with them, but when you put them all together and try to imagine them as an agenda (call it Project 2025 or Agenda 47), such an agenda would be massive. There's no way for Trump to accomplish even a fraction of this in a single term. He first has to undo four years' worth of damage by an incompetent leader, and you can bet he's going to meet with titanic resistance from both Democrats and Republicans (remember: Republicans were worse than Democrats when it came to resisting construction of the border wall). That right there—undoing all of Biden's damage—is going to take a long time. It'll be up to whoever comes after Trump to carry on the agenda. I'm also not comfortable with the right's move to saying things like Trump got shot in the face or shot in the head (see above, #1). Say it accurately: he was clipped, grazed, or winged in the ear. I'm not minimizing the danger of the 7/13 situation: it really is spectacular that Trump moved his head at the last moment—just enough to save his own life. I'm not denying or diminishing that. But phrases like shot in the head conjure up gory images of Kennedy (yes, I saw "JFK").

Securing the border is, by itself, a monumental task that will span several administrations, assuming any continuity, which we can't assume, given our political system and the American public's infamous fickleness. And tackling our national debt? Yeah, good luck with that. Trump did little to nothing about the debt his first time around, and Biden merely heaped more shit onto the pile. Most presidents, I'm coming to realize, just stare at the debt in awe and quietly defer it to their successors.

As for bureaucratic bloat: you can cut it down, but you can't think of that as the end of the story because it's only going to grow back, like those horrific growths all over the extremities of the late, great Dede the Tree-man. Dede is a good metaphor for the American economy.

Still, I like and agree with Musk's reasons for voting for Trump. I just don't think Trump will be able to do much in only four years. And like Biden, he's not getting any younger. Assuming he wins this November, I'll wish him the best of luck.