The Trump-Musk Messy Breakup is the Joy We All Deserve.
Don't clutch your pearls. Bring your popcorn.
Well, here we are, Earthlings. We did it again. We summoned a timeline so absolutely, hilariously stupid that it reads like an episode of Veep that got rejected for its absurdity. It is maybe a little weird to suggest that in the middle of whatever moment in history this is — a time defined by algorithmic disinformation, escalating fascism, ambient climate dread, and late-stage capitalism — it might be okay, or at least not morally negligent, to openly enjoy the public falling-out between Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk.
This is about politics, about power and about who gets to be the main character of Hell. And we the citizens of the peanut gallery, the unpaid extras in this dystopian sitcom, are giggling in our group chats, retweeting memes, and photoshopping Musk into Ivanka’s old place on the golden escalator. Good. We should. We should laugh hard and long.
Of course this raises all kinds of distressing questions about distraction and complicity and the limits of irony in a collapsing republic. There are legitimate concerns about the ethics of deriving pleasure from the fracturing of alliances between two men who, even while they’re bitching at each other, are still very clearly colluding (consciously or otherwise) in the corrosion of civic meaning itself. But hang on. Bear with me. Because this might not be a distraction from vigilance — it might be a supplement to it.
What if you’re allowed to laugh and care at the same time?
The moral anxiety here is a kind of low-frequency hum for a certain kind of chronically online person (me, and let's be honest, you). The tension between amusement and alarm, between irony and earnestness. If you let yourself laugh at this surreal, tabloid-esque feud, aren’t you somehow weakening your resistance to the underlying threat these men still very much represent?
This is, I think, the real question hiding inside the memes and schadenfreude: Is enjoying this moment some kind of ethical lapse? Are we being lulled into passivity by our own lolz?
Let me stop you right there. Amusement is not the opposite of vigilance
Joy, laughter, absurdity — humor — are actually crucial emotional technologies that help us metabolize the grotesque and unrelenting avalanche of awfulness that defines modern political and social life.
Joy is necessary for survival. The moment they convince you to give up joy, they’ve got you. Not just your vote, your dollar, or your biometric data — your spirit. And what are we if not spirits in wobbling meat-sacks who try desperately to do right in a world run by fools, crooks, and algorithm manipulators?
You’re not betraying the cause of democracy because you laughed at a tweet where Trump is photoshopped crying while putting a sticker on a Tesla. You’re not undermining your commitment to social justice if you let out a gleeful cackle watching Musk getting torn apart by red hat cultists. You are human.
One of the hardest truths about fascism (and its younger tech-bro cousin, technocratic authoritarianism) is that it doesn’t just want your compliance. It wants your interiority. It wants your mood. It wants to colonize the theater of your consciousness so completely that even your pleasures become suspect. It wants to make you feel guilty for feeling good. It desperately wants you to stop laughing, because laughter breaks the spell of despair.
It is fun to watch Trump and Musk go at it — two men who have built public personas around domination and a kind of reptilian invulnerability. To find it funny when they look petty, or weak or are humiliated is not a betrayal of seriousness. It is actually a form of moral clarity. It’s seeing that the emperor is not only naked but has ketchup around his mouth and is yelling at his phone about “ratings.”
You are allowed to find that funny. You are allowed to be awake and amused. You are allowed to hold in your mind both the seriousness of Trump’s ongoing Christo-fascist project and the way he can’t pronounce “anonymous” without sounding like he’s chewing marbles. You are allowed to know that Musk’s mutant version of Twitter is a digital dystopia and laugh when he tweets something that sounds like it was written by an AI program desperately trying to impress a thirteen-year-old boy.
This is not cognitive dissonance. It is cognitive complexity. And to be honest, I’d rather drink from a glorious chalice of schadenfreude than to clutch my pearls in the fetal position.
Yes, Donald Trump is dangerous. He has the emotional maturity of a hot glue gun and the dictatorial aspirations of a badly written comic villain. And he has the nuclear codes.
Yes, Elon Musk is also dangerous. He’s the world’s richest man playing a perverse version of SimCity where every citizen has to laugh at his jokes or get shadowbanned from public discourse. And he has all our personal information.
But watching them destroy each other’s credibility with their supporters is not only not a distraction — it’s a gift. It’s like if the Death Star and Mordor filed restraining orders against each other. We get to watch two demagogues tangle up their flacid egos in real time. Why wouldn’t you enjoy that?
Now, of course, the Very Serious People™ will say, “But we must remain vigilant! We mustn't lower our guard!”