Trump vs. Elon: No matter who loses, we win! “Photo” credit: X Image Generator. And trust me, that’s Elon on the left. You just didn’t recognize him with the extra weight. He’s on Mounjaro in real life.

As an elementary-age military brat, I lived in Germany for three years. And while I found it to be a beautiful country, I wasn’t all that crazy about many of the “gifts” they’d bestowed upon us: The brusque, blocky language that is so….. Germanic. The “inspection shelf” in German toilets. (If I wanted to be that close to waste, I’d have become a dung beetle.) Their contempt for ice. Hitler. Yet I was down with the Germans on one thing: we’re both lovers of schadenfreude, which combines the word schaden (damage) with freude (joy). Taking joy in others’ misfortunes, especially of the self-created variety, is probably the finest German export. Or at least it’s right up there with Kölsch and Heidi Klum.

And so for me, Christmas morning came in June this year when jackasses started nipping at each other’s noses, i.e., Elon Musk and Donald Trump ended their destructive bromance and started going at it like honey badgers in a gunny sack. Leaving me no choice but to express schadenfreude on Notes, even if it’s unkind to make fun of the mentally-ill:

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By this late date (a day after the feud truly blew up, and just a week after Trump and Elon said their friendly, tearful goodbyes as Elon returned to his collapsing kingdom), you can read blow-by-blows of the catfight just about everywhere. (Here’s a helpful one in the Wall Street Journal).

I won’t belabor all the particulars, since so much hissing and clawing has already transpired, that it would be damn near impossible to capture in its glorious entirety. And besides, both cats are so schizoid as a matter of course, that by the time I hit “send” on this, they might very well have reconciled, with Trump possibly even making Elon’s four-year-old son, X Æ A-12 (pronounced “absurd”), the ceremonial Secretary of Booger-Wiping. And Trump and Elon could put their petty differences aside so that they can get back to the much more serious work of destroying our federal government.

At first blush, it looks like some ships have sailed that might be hard to steer back to port. After all, how do you make nice with a guy, if you’re Musk, after you’ve mercilessly ridiculed his baby (Trump’s “big beautiful bill”), suggested Trump will cause a recession, and that he should be impeached, while stating outright that Trump’s Justice Department hasn’t released the Jeffrey Epstein files because Trump is in them? While we’ve long known Trump and Epstein liked to party together -- here’s video proof with Trump in full white-man’s-overbite dancing mode -- it would seem that accusing your former bestie of consorting with child sex-offenders would preclude asking him to babysit X Æ A-12, going forward.

For Trump’s part, he has claimed Elon’s presence was “wearing thin” (the most believable thing Trump has said in a long time), and that he fired him like some commoner on The Apprentice. He additionally called Elon “crazy” and the “man who has lost his mind” (also not a stretch when describing the habitual Ketamine user and frequent illegitimate-children-sperm-donor). And Trump is now threatening to cut Elon’s billions-of-dollars-worth of government contracts, which would be a double-blow to Musk since Tesla stock is further tanking since Elon started the Assholocaust.

It’s hard to see Trump making amends with that sort of object of ire, and he’s already said he has no interest in trying. Then again, he wasn’t much interested in making amends with pre-beardo faux populist JD Vance, after the latter called him “reprehensible” and an “idiot,” a “cynical asshole,” and “America’s Hitler.” And look who became Vice President!

In Trump’s world, truth isn’t the only thing that’s fluid.

This, of course, has caused lots of MAGAbot confusion (as in the case of Fox’s Will Cain practically crying that his two dads were breaking up), while Elon unfollowed Trump’s henchman Stephen Miller (whose wife recently went to work for Elon — a dangerous thing to do, if you don’t want to end up pregnant). In the meantime, Steve Bannon (always the light touch, authoritarian-wise), suggested his Trump-attention-rival, Elon, should now be deported immediately, while Elon’s company, Space X, should be “seized.”

You know you’ve sunk into the middle of a total Assholocaust when Hitler-loving Kanye is stepping in as a cooler head, tweeting: ““Broooos please noooooo,” which he followed with a hugging emoji. “We love you both so much.”

Unlike Spotify’s favorite Nazi, Kanye, I don’t love either of these buffoons so much, or even a little. Which is why despite all the punditry’s chin-tugging about how this fight could be bad on all kinds of fronts — from our space program (which is now largely outsourced to Elon’s Space X), to help for Ukraine, to just generally advertising American dysfunction — I can’t fight the delight that comes from watching this death match, so I won’t.

Sure, I’m encouraged that for a change, both of these serial-disinformation peddlers are telling the truth, if only about each other. And despite how character-deficient Elon is — and trust me, Democrats, he is, so don’t be too tempted to crawl into bed with him just because he is temporarily the enemy of your enemy — Elon is at least advertising to MAGAbots that their emperor has no clothes. Something the rest of us have been telling them for oh…….about a decade plus. But sometimes, you can only hear the bad news from one of your own.

The Trump/Elon spat, however, has me feeling the same way I felt during the Iran-Iraq War. Which is one of the reasons I was reticent about America throwing over Saddam Hussein, even if Saddam was an utter monster who deserved throwing over. The strategic-rivalry theory being that sometimes, when two evil powers collide, they have less energy to inflict their evil on the rest of us, since they are too busy trying to destroy each other. Maybe, just maybe, if Trump and Elon keep it up, a few more hundred thousand federal workers won’t be fired, and we won’t see everything from medical research to food-aid-to-the-starving to our own weather prediction further decimated.

Is it ideal for America to be led by a buffoonish president who is locked into some show-me-yours narcissism contest with an equally sociopathic billionaire? Of course it isn’t.

But “responsible leadership” is a ship that sailed long ago. And which has next-to-no hope of being steered back to port. Not with the current cast of characters. Roughly half of the American people asked for this, so they deserve to get it, good and hard, as H.L. Mencken once characterized democracy. As for the rest of us, sometimes, we’re left rooting for the only available/second-best outcome. And I, for one, am presently willing to settle.

Here’s hoping Trump and Elon fight on!

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Bonus Track: I’d like to send out this long-distance dedication from Donald Trump to Elon Musk, which I’m pretty sure Trump would do himself if he had better musical taste, and didn’t just listen to The Village People and Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is Justin Vernon of Bon Iver doing one of Bonnie Raitt’s greatest songs of all-time, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” with a little “Nick of Time” tacked onto the end.