How Musk and Trump's face-off may affect US democracy

IOL News

11-07-2025

THERE is a raging war of words between Elon Musk and US President Donald J Trump.
Image: AFP
THERE is a raging war of words between Elon Musk and the Empire, or President Donald J Trump, to be exact. Musk, the X proprietor, is the perfect backdrop against which a drama of such enormous proportions can play out.
A rivalry billed as a tussle between the richest man in the world against the most powerful president in the world, their public spat over social media may be the terminal episode of the empire games.
Whatever the deeper underlying causes of this tragicomedy are, they have profound unintended consequences. For one, and most importantly, how far can money be permitted to influence or taint with impropriety the sanctity of elections and their outcomes?
Put differently, in the determination whether or not the outcomes of a general election met the golden standard of free and fair, at what point should the effect of extraneous factors be considered or ignored?
In any other regulated setting including a competitive process in an application for employment, tendering for a public service or a hearing in a judicial process, among others, is forbidden for a bidding candidate or indeed a subject of adjudication to offer money, sexual favours or for that matter, any other morally repugnant incentive of value to distort the outcomes of the bid or enquiry. Such conduct will be adjudged to have violated the propriety of the process, therefore rendering the outcome wholly unfair and illegal.
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Musk did not invent the system that produced Trump or DJT, his favourite endearment for the President. Indeed, he has now formed a political party of his own called America Party, a creation that has triggered violent quakes in the American political establishment. He plans to end the stranglehold of duopoly in US politics and, to the extent possible, re-imagine the kingmaker dynamic inside Congress and the Senate.
The Donald has been truly mortified by its announcement. He took to Truth Social to fire a volley of accusations and subliminal threats. His anxiety is understandable. It is more about the unbending resolve of its founder as well as the new party's disruption potential on the MAGA universe. All that Trump felt constrained from voicing is that until Musk explains how he intends to be free from the Israeli lobby, his party will soon be captured like the Democrats and the Republicans.
The spectre of money raises a number of philosophical questions which neither Trump nor the entire 'collective west' can satisfactorily answer. This is because the concept of democracy as a facet of the supreme will of the people has no equal. No matter the country, it can be called by any other name. Its sanctity, however, lies in the fact that it periodically expresses the will of the people sought to be governed by it.
Yet, the contraption loudly touted as democracy is a perverted set of mangled processes designed to express the will of those who can buy their way into it and own it. On the one hand, there is Musk, the billionaire class and the wealthy superpacs who insist that their voting dollars should return a favourable political purchase. They are pitted against the rest of the voting masses, on the other hand, who erroneously believe that their vote alone is the ultimate determiner of the affairs of the sovereign.
Perverted to this deplorable extent, the 2024 US Presidential elections delivered the setting that presaged the battle of the two titans. Musk dutifully bought the elections for Trump. And in the case of South Africa, Rob Hersov boasts of having bought Ramaphosa the ANC presidency with bags and bags of money so as to sway the ANC Mpumalanga provincial delegates against Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
That both men had similar expectations from their purchases is not in doubt. Yet, whether or not their respective objectives were similarly realised is unclear. In the case of Musk, it is a subject of public knowledge that Trump disappointed his benefactor. For Rob Hersov, however, the results are moot, making his appearances on local podcasts and media broadcasts always indignant and accusatory.
It would seem, therefore, that democracy is the direct opposite of meritocracy. Small wonder, then, that more often than not, its mechanics tend to catapult the most incompetent candidates to the apogee of power. With practised dexterity, the benefactors of our version of democracy easily find and pay for those who are amenable to purvey the most insensitive political instincts on behalf of their unseen overlords.
Could we then be persuaded to conclude that in a Trump versus Musk duel, there will be an outright winner and an outright loser? Hard to tell. In this battle without rules, no matter who wins, democracy, or that capitalist market for people's votes, is bound to lose.
There are two possible outcomes in this depressing spectacle. Either Trump will win spectacularly or, as the bookies tend to predict, may win somewhat less spectacularly. Whichever would be the case, may the less deplorable version of winner triumph. But the golden rule of the casino is indisputable. The House always wins.
Musk may be bringing a Twitter knife to a nuclear gun fight. But he already knows that. The America Party is an agency meant to lend legitimacy to his fight and, the CIA/FBI deep state permitting, equalise the rules of engagement.
To be fair, Trump has been fighting a very different war, making the spats on social media with Musk an irritating distraction. Ever since he descended from the escalators in the Trump Tower to declare his presidential ambitions, Donald J Trump has had a very different interpretation of what the power of the US empire is or should be. Or, as it had become his go-to refrain, how over time such power has been used or misused, as the case may be, by different incumbents in that most consequential office in the unipolar order.
He had planned to place the imprimatur of state in the hands of the President and dictate to the world from the intimidating heights of the Oval Office. His disdain for constant referrals to Congress and the Senate is amply demonstrated by a profusion of orders regulating mundane issues of state and the not-so-mundane others. This complex manoeuvre of fusing the power of the President with the might of the empire became apparent in the second stint of Donald J.Trump as the 47th President. It was quick, rapturous and overarching.
For a politician whose cunning is concealed by his insouciant theatrics, and his emotional and intelligence quotient referred to in derisive terms, he mastered a sweeping stroke that will forever haunt the politics of the United States of America. In one fell swoop, he turned a President into an Emperor.
As for Musk, according to the restriction found in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the US Constitution preventing him from becoming a President of the United States, of America, his field of strategy becomes narrowed notwithstanding its grand ambitions. Between kingmaker and filibuster, it may also provide the ultimate cover for its founder against political persecution.
For the tech billionaire, however, he has to deal with the biggest elephant in the room. But his ability to do so is limited by idiosyncratic factors. For one, the cardinal sin of throwing money at elections is a Musk problem. And this war is unfolding on X, Musk's media mouthpiece.
This probably means that Musk is himself the biggest elephant in his own room.
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL. Get the real story on the go: Follow the Sunday Independent on WhatsApp.