Donald Trump 2.0, The Federal Informant President: Doing a Deal With the Donald Isn't Easy...
Some time ago I wrote a piece about why Donald Trump isn’t going to jail.
You can read it here and it was published in August 2022 so it’s held up pretty well.
“I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers,” Trump told Ainsley Earhardt in 2018. “I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”
I suspect that there are quite a number of Republicans who supported the election of Donald Trump because they hope that they can cut a deal with The Donald. Marc Andreessen intimated as much. So, too, did Roelof Botha.
But can they actually do a deal with the Donald though? Or is the whole thing something of a feint? Why would Trump keep whatever promises he’s made to the tech world?
You’re going to have to change how you view appointment. Maybe a presidential appointment is a way of ruining your life and exposing you to the press and other intelligence services?
The recent news that Howard Lutnik’s firm was indicted by the SEC gives us a sense of how criminal many of Trump’s closest backers are.
So, too, the news that Elon Musk is facing his own SEC inquiry. How will the First Buddy respond? My sense is that he’ll throw a tantrum and then get a spanking.
While much of the focus has been on Musk’s feud with Gary Gensler the initial probe into Elon began under Trump 1.0.
Less attention has focused on Jared Birchall’s role. Birchall is the Mormon who is the fixer for Musk. I first encountered him when I warned him about how Musk should be backing a Russian poker player with his overvalued Tesla shares. Birchall bested Igor Kurganov and then Musk moved against me.
Isn’t it kind of interesting that Musk’s Mormon led firm Quinn Emanuel is suing me and that the SEC looks also to subpoena Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, and to focus on Neurolink which is the firm where Birchall is the CEO?
My lawyer Bernie Kleinman more or less exposed the weakness of Quinn Emmanuel’s position.
The purpose of the lawsuit was to humiliate me but in an interesting way, it’s having the opposite effect. I’m being contacted by many different people who want to work together on the latest and greatest technology.
Like Peter Thiel, Musk, too, is being separated from his masters. How precisely it’ll happen remains to be seen but it’ll happen all the same. You get the sense that that’s already happening around SpaceX and now Tesla.
I’ve gotten tremendous pressure not to talk about what’s going on.
A friend of mine today compared the coming breakup between Musk and Trump to that of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson. Could be.
But isn’t Trump famous for taking a bunch of people’s money and screwing them over?
You might even make an argument that Trump turning on them is serving our nationalist interest. Might Donald Trump be exactly the hero we need?
Mike Johnson isn’t Paul Ryan. John Thune isn’t Mitch McConnell. And with $15 million from Disney, Trump’s presidential library is ready for a new chapter.