As those of you who read this column on a regular basis have probably noticed, I have not discussed yet how Elon Musk fits into the picture of Trump’s cult. This is because, Musk is a relatively recent addition to the political landscape in the United States, and I wanted to focus initially on the more basic enduring aspects involved with having a populist cult figure like Trump exerting his influence in our society and then winning the presidency. Nevertheless, Musk is like an elephant in the room who I can no longer ignore.
So, the first question is what is Musk’s place in Trump’s cult. Just because he’s not the top man on the totem pole, does not mean he is in any way on the level of a follower. A follower, in this situation, is someone who gives up his individual sense of self to a great extent and merges psychologically with the cult leader, in this case, Trump. Musk, being supposedly the richest man in the world, and being as creative as he is, he is not going to merge with anyone and become a follower. And frankly, Trump wouldn’t want it that way. At least, not a total merger. What Trump would like is for Musk to become psychologically an appendage of his through a partial merger. Musk would become attached to Trump without totally merging with him.
Musk has shown his skills in two different areas. He has demonstrated to the world his giftedness in creating companies like Tesla and Space-x. And then he has shown how he has been able to turn his giftedness into a vehicle for making an insane amount of money. Trump is trying to use the economic power that Musk has gained from his creative and economic successes as a way of enhancing his own demonstration of power. It is sort of like Trump wants to be able to exert his influence as the most powerful puppeteer on the face of the earth. So, in spite of the fact that Musk exerts his independent will in a way that gives him a sense of great power and control, Trump’s vision is that Musk is going to let himself be subsumed under his, Trump’s aegis.
Except that, in, truth, Musk has other ideas. Musk wants to be another sun in the solar system. He has come out against the nativist philosophy which says American jobs are meant only for Americans and not for immigrants. He and Vivek Ramiswamy have argued that we need immigrants, especially in the tech world, to be able to take jobs for which there are supposedly no Americans available.
Anyway, there is this notion that Americans are simply not up to the job of high tech positions.
For the average American who is looking for grounding to fight the experiential vacuum created by our modern technological environment, having Musk in the picture has got to be very confusing and even frightening. Particularly, having a disagreement on an issue as fundamental to modern America as immigration is going to destroy the sense of grounding that Trump has been trying to create. And even though Trump appears to be moving in Musk’s direction on the issue, the MAGA movement as a whole is not.
So, Trump is caught in a dilemma. He has already brought Musk into the mainstream as an important political player with whom to be reckoned. Unlike other people that Trump has given political support to and then discarded, Musk is not going to go quietly into the sunset. So, if Trump tries to discard Musk, he’s going to get real pushback. That pushback is going to create real divisions amongst Trump’s supporters which is going to fracture the sense of mystical togetherness and the sense of security from the grounding that Trump’s cult has created. Because he wasn’t born in the U.S., Musk can never officially become president. But he can definitely have a strong influence on the direction governmental solutions take for many of the problem issues being presently addressed.
For those of us who would like to see Trump’s power dissipate, Musk may be the perfect solution. His presence will create major divisions in the MAGA base. This will lead first to chaos as Trumpsters won’t know which way to turn in order to get their sense of direction. Ultimately, the chaos will just lead to paralysis, which will lead to immersing themselves in numbness and the experiential vacuum that they were trying to escape when first they embraced Trump. So first, the overstimulating tension-pocket of chaos and then, the understimulating vacuum of paralysis. First, a rollercoaster and then, a broken rollercoaster. It’s going to be a lot of fun living in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Because when all is said and done, we are all going to be affected by this rollercoaster.
© 2025 Laurence Mesirow
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