Elon is the new Trump: But how long can he hold the No. 1 Troll title?

Poor Donald Trump must be feeling especially unloved right now. Practically everyone in the Republican Party is blaming him for their losses in the midterm elections, and few of his usual media supporters are defending him in his latest legal woes. At least some recent polls have him trailing Ron DeSantis in the forthcoming race for the GOP presidential nomination — and if he pulls it off anyway, suggest that he'd lose the general election to Joe Biden. But what has to hurt more than anything is that his title as chief MAGA troll has been usurped by a man who has outstripped him in virtually every way: Elon Musk.

Now, it's true that Trump can brag that he was used to be president of the United States, but that's getting old considering that everyone knows that he lost his re-election bid and has spent the last two years whining like a tired toddler that it was stolen from him. That accomplishment is irrevocably tarnished. But Musk's business career leaves Trump with his old fashioned real estate fortune in the dust. Musk has nine children by three different women, and iss still working on it. Most important, Musk has way, way, more money than Trump, even if as of this week he's been demoted from the richest man in the world to No. 2.

Trump is a principal in the Truth Social platform and Musk is the outright owner of Twitter, if you squint you could claim they are ostensibly on equal footing when it comes to social media power. But once again, it's not close and Musk is the big winner of the platform wars. Twitter has massive media influence and helps set the political agenda, while Truth Social is just a relatively tiny echo chamber for Trump fans. Trump had 75 million Twitter followers. Musk has 120 million.

In other words, Elon Musk is the man Trump has been pretending to be.

Trump's 2024 Revenge Tour is off to an extremely slow start, and that's putting it generously. He has hardly left the private residence at his Florida beach club except to come downstairs and eat dinner with a couple of antisemites. His social media feed is mostly re-posts of worshipful memes about him and some all-caps primal screaming about his legal difficulties. Every once in a while he says something about present-tense politics but mostly it's just kvetching about the 2020 election. There have been no rallies, no real interviews, no ads, no press conferences, nothing. Let's just say it's an unusual way to start a presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Musk has completely taken over the political conversation that Trump used to dominate. He's mastered the art of the right-wing troll, openly courting the most extreme denizens of the fever swamps and delighting in shocking normal decent people with crude, over-the-top statements. There is a new outrage almost every day as he dives head first down the wingnut rabbit hole and revels in the fuss he causes. Rich Lowry, writing for the New York Post, says Musk has "trumped Trump as the nation's foremost culture warrior." There you have it.

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A sampling of Musk's recent tweets show someone who is completely immersed in some of the craziest right wing arcana, including anti-vax and QAnon conspiracy theories. He's also shown that he has a mission that's driving him and likely explains why he bought Twitter in the first place. For example:

Many battles remain, but, yes, the tide is starting to turn on the mortal threat to civilization that is the woke mind virus.
Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.

He appears to believe he has been called to save humanity by owning the libs, which mostly amounts to relentless trolling, and allowing all kinds of fascists, racists, dirty tricksters and snake oil salesmen free rein to spread their "ideas" in the online public square. No doubt they're enjoying themselves, at least until the objects of their derision and cruelty simply decide to leave. Will humankind have been rescued from the evil of wokeness if that happens? It appears we are going to find out.

Musk appears to believe he has been called to save humanity, which mostly amounts to endless trolling and allowing all kinds of fascists, racists, dirty tricksters and snake oil salesmen free rein to spread their "ideas."

Musk has released some of the internal Twitter correspondence regarding the infamous "Hunter Biden laptop" story and Donald Trump's post-Jan. 6 Twitter ban to a couple of contrarian journalists. Musk and his allies have evidently reached the conclusion that Twitter committed unpardonable sins that resulted in Trump losing the election, in the first instance, and then being unfairly railroaded, in the second. Those conclusions are highly contested, to put it mildly.

It's ridiculous to claim that one news story about a presidential candidate's adult son being suppressed for a couple of days on one social media platform made any difference in the election (which up until now we've been told had been stolen at the ballot box). And as for Trump's Twitter ban, he should have been thrown off the platform long before he was. He lied incessantly, blabbed classified information and put people's lives in danger with his big mouth, including his own vice president on Jan. 6.

Trump sees the "Twitter files" as ultimate vindication, of course, and demanded that the Constitution be terminated so he can be reinstated as president immediately. For a moment, he got the attention he craved when the political world reacted as it typically does whenever he says something insane. But mostly he's being ignored, which has to have him intensely frustrated.

But Donald Trump has an ace in the hole. Musk may be creating daily entertainment with the endless chaos of his Twitter takeover and all the hiring and firing at random, but Trump may be about to vault back into the spotlight in operatic fashion. He has one thing going for him that Musk with all his money and success doesn't have. He may be looking at a criminal indictment, and perversely enough, that might be exactly what he needs. There's nothing that turns on the American right more than grievance. Elon Musk's greatest weakness, at this point, is that he's got nothing to complain about.