Trump and Musk usher in The Age of Disinformation

Donald Trump has been installed the President of the United States of America.

Jesus wept.

What a way to start the year.

Already it is clear that the whole world is going to have to suffer, to make this selfish, whiney, grievance-fuelled, mendacious, conman and bully, and his preposterous, money-grubbing mates, even richer.

The PR in advance suggested that we would see a new Donald Trump – Donald The Unifier! – at the inauguration.

“The Golden Age of America begins right now,” he opened modestly.

However, it took him just 77 words to get to his first attack – on the US Department of Justice, no less. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” he said.

Will it indeed?

No one who has listened to Trump’s speeches on the campaign trail will believe a word of it. In fact, he has threatened, or promised, to push that weaponisation to a whole new level. If you take him at his word, he will do everything he can to expunge his perceived opponents from any and every area of the public life, and replace them with Trump loyalists.

Soon, he was echoing his inauguration speech in 2016, a rant in which he had talked about American carnage and how everything in the US had turned to shit.

“For many years,” he now said, “a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and, seemingly, in complete disrepair.”

He seemed – or his speechwriter seemed – to have forgotten that he was the President for four of the last eight years.

WIDE-RANGING TARIFFS

The speech was packed with similar examples of self-delusion and hypocrisy. The hurricane that swept through North Carolina and the wildfires in California were blamed on a lack of emergency services rather than a climate crisis that is already melting the icebergs north and south. More or less everyone in the science community is agreed that global warming has reached dangerous levels, triggering extreme weather events – and that the use of fossil fuels is a key factor in accelerating the breakdown.

Not the American president. Trump’s response to towering infernos is to promise to extract even more oil and gas and burn these fuels recklessly. “Drill, baby, drill,” he said, in a reprise of a campaign slogan. The sycophants in the crowd – meaning most of them – loved it.

He promised a series of executive orders, declaring, among many other fake news items: a national emergency on the southern border; a national energy emergency; a national emergency emergency; the end of the Green New Deal; an end to Government censorship and the restriction of free speech; changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America…

One of those is not real.

On and on he droned in what was a truly pedestrian, badly written, woodenly delivered attempt at sounding like a man with gravitas.

Inevitably, he claimed a special relationship with God – who, of course, has a special relationship with America.

“Just a few months ago,” he said, “in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Does Donald Trump believe this? Not a chance. He knows that he got lucky. But he’ll exploit the great escape in any and every way he can.

The problem is that over half of the American electorate do seem to believe this utterly absurd nonsense. If God was able to change the course of the would-be assassin’s bullet, why didn’t he – or she – just prevent the lad from being able to get to the rally, or make him trip and sprain and ankle badly five minutes before he could fire the shot?

Letting the bullet graze Trump’s ear – that has to have been too risky for words!

Thankfully, the sniper wasn’t a great shot. He missed by enough to ensure that Trump was not badly injured. It should never have happened. But when it did, the presidential writing was on the wall. I said it at the time: this could be enough on its own to propel him into The White House. And now he’s there.

“We are one people, one family and one glorious nation under God,” he said, forgetting all the acidic bile he had spat, during the campaign, at what he called ’the enemy within’.

Worst of all, there were very real threats in what he said. He talked about the the United States giving the Panama Canal to Panama as a ‘gift’ ‚ forgetting that the canal was carved through Panamanian territory.

The Panama Canal

“China is operating the Panama Canal,” he claimed, “and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”

Think about it: “We’re taking it back.”

If China said something similar about Taiwan, how would American politicians react? That is a more interesting question now than ever. Perhaps Trump has some kind of trade-off in mind. “We’ll take the Panama canal. You take Taiwan. Oh and by the way, we’re taking Greenland as well…”

And then there’s immigration. Trump accused the Biden government of providing “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

One might ask how mental institutions could have ‘entered our country’ but no matter. Literacy was never a strong point.

“All illegal entry will immediately be halted,” he said, “and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

Hold on for a sec, buddy! Has anyone factored in the cost of returning ‘millions and millions’ of ‘aliens’? Trump should have a word with Rishi Sunak about the Rwanda deal, which was costing about 200k per individual deported...

There was much talk, in the speech, of freedom, ambition, greatness, success, wealth and prosperity. But here’s the rub. Most economists agree that the retreaded President’s plan to introduce wide-ranging tariffs will actually increase the cost of living for the majority of Americans. In contrast, his plan to lower taxes on business will make lots more money for corporations and their owners and directors. And yet his fans have been blinded. They just don’t see it.

CLIMATE CRISIS DENIAL

Maybe half of this stuff is bluster, a way to keep the mob onside. But however you cut it, the likelihood is that the vast majority of the people who elected Donald Trump will be left as miserably badly off as they were under Biden, while the 1% skip away with more cream than any one person could ever dream of getting through in five-hundred lifetimes.

That’s capitalism 2025 style.

According to all of the estimates, Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet. He is, we are told, worth in the region of $700 billion. In fact, if things go according to plan with Trump, Musk is on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.

You don’t need to be told that this kind of wealth is too obscene for words. And yet, in what might be considered a piece of surreal black humour, Trump has appointed Musk as co-director of the newly made-up Department of Government Efficiency.

Wait! From a distance, I can’t tell if you’re laughing or crying. Ah, both. I understand...

Of all people, Elon Musk – along with another billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy – will be responsible for cutting the costs of running the country. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so ridiculous. A key part of this will be reducing the federal work force – according to Ramaswamy by as much as 75%. How the people who are ousted from their jobs, will benefit from the oncoming Golden Age must remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, Musk will pocket even more cash in subsidies and contracts for his businesses – whether it’s X, Tesla or the gang he has brought together in a plan to fly to Mars. Does Donald Trump know how to spell “conflict of interest?”

We’ll come back to Musk.

Over the next short while, we will see what Trump has in mind for Ukraine. There is a possibility that he might pull the plug entirely on US support for the defence of Ukraine – though his threats in relation to the Panama Canal, and Greenland, may sour his chummy relationship with Vladimir Putin. On this, he is unpredictable.

His approach to Israel’s murderous bombardment of Gaza may be even more incendiary. There is, I think, a very strong likelihood that Israel will start bombing again in six weeks time. They will justify this on the basis that they are “preventing Hamas from regrouping.” And with that, the land theft will escalate again in the West Bank. Alarmingly, Trump might just encourage Netanyahu to go for broke. It could be vicious beyond words.

So what, in global affairs, can we really say is Hot for 2025? Genocide. Climate crisis denial. A new kind of imperialism. Macho bullshit. Theft of land and resources. However you clip it, the year ahead is not exactly looking like fun.

LIES AND PROPAGANDA

At the heart of all of this, is disinformation. Turning reality upside down.

Musk may be the most prominent, but he is not the only tech oligarch sucking madly up to Donald Trump. Peter Thiel. Jeff Besos. Mark Zuckerberg. The tech bros have clustered around Trump, infiltrating his mafia. Like Twitter (now X), Facebook are dispensing with a load of content moderators. They are changing the rules to allow what are clearly racist, homophobic and hate-filled comments and responses to be published.

The inescapable truth then is that – in 2025 – liberal democracies will be under greater threat than ever before.

They already are.

Social media companies have knowingly colluded in the rise of the far right across Europe. They allow the Russians, as well as local fascists in Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Spain and more, to create false accounts, concoct and spread lies, and generally exploit people’s neuroses and fears. The more this is happening, the better it suits Musk and Zuckerberg, who rake in the advertising revenue and sing dumb.

If these guys were making a disgusting fortune over the past four years, with Trump installed as President, they are set to make far more again...

Even that was not enough for Elon Musk. I’m not sure that it is relevant that he is a white South African, for whom racism and a sense of superiority may well have been learned from the cradle.

Musk has attacked UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Safeguarding Minister Jess Philips on entirely false premises in relation to grooming gangs and chanpioned the far right thug Tommy Robinson. With elections upcoming, he has declared his support via X for the fascist party, AfD, in Germany.

What is he doing here? He is editorialising. He is publishing his thoughts, ideas and prejudices. Which might not matter a lot, except that he also controls the algorithms that promote one post over another. He can force whatever poisonous prejudice he sticks into the public domain into the feeds of any number of real individuals.

That he can do any and all of this without having to worry about libel, accuracy or truthfulness is a travesty. He should be subject to the same rules as RTÉ, the Irish Independent or Hot Press.

It gets worse. Speaking in advance of Trump’s inauguration in the capitol building, Musk made what was, unmistakably, a fascist salute, raising his hand dramatically at an angle, with his palm facing downwards.

And then he did it again. Most of us will have seen it. It is a fascist salute and no amount of pussyfooting by the likes of the Anti Defamation League will change that.

So this is the scene. The restraints are being removed from social media. The Russians are queueing up on one side to spread lies and propaganda. The acolytes of Trump are queueing on the other, with their own tainted brand of fake news, conspiracy theories and lies that aim to undermine democracy.

They are all involved in a race to the bottom, which will doubtless enrich a tiny percentage of people hugely – and perhaps bring an end to democracy.

The only way to challenge that is through regulation and massive fines. But the EU is, it seems, too scared to do what is necessary. If they don’t act soon, and strongly, they will – we all will – live to regret it.

Welcome to 2025.