Friday, December 20, 2024

ELONIUS REX


All right, here’s an idea for the coming New Year. Why don’t we just get real and inaugurate—perhaps coronate would be a better term—Elon Musk on January 20. Clearly, judging from January 6, 2021, the GOP isn’t partial to election certification anyway, so what the hell? Why not? Voter will be damned.

I mean, the all-male Republican Party “leadership” has apparently become a sniveling pack of geldlings subordinate to any billionaire dictator willing to hijack the party and call the shots, so, hey, why not the richest man in the world while we’re at it, not some paper-tiger billionaire who got kicked off of the Forbes 400 list in 2023. Okay, in all fairness, if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for billionaires, Trump, hanging by his tiny fingernails, is back on this year—could it have been the golden sneakers, the chintzy bibles (I’m assuming specially designed to be read upside down), or a new surge in MAGA caps that made the difference? Who knows?

But it’s hardly a secret that he’s no longer in charge. At least not after this week, when Elonius Rex bared his teeth and tanked a solid bipartisan attempt to avoid a government shutdown—a thoughtful pre-inauguration gift from Musk-Trump/MAGA to the Nation in the mean-spiritedness of billionaire Noël. Face it, no quantity of ghosts of Christmas Past, Present or Future are going to shame these guys into a Dickensian redemption. They’re just plain mean-for-life.

Anyway, it has become abundantly clear, even before the latest edition of the Trump Era has officially begun, that Elonius Rex isn’t the pasty, clownish, foppish, fatuous Trump cheerleader that he appeared to be during the campaign. No, no, this is the world’s richest man, and that kind of wealth can buy almost anything. I mean, except a way out of a final meeting with the Grim Reaper, and, statistically speaking, Trump and I are a lot closer to keeping that date than Elon is. Personally, I’ve been aware of that for a very long time now. But I have a feeling it will come as an incredible shock to the Trumpster when the Reaper’s schedule-keeper punches the Duke of Orange’s ticket.

Meanwhile, Trump did all the heavy lifting of winning the election and giving Elonius Rex an unofficial, unassailable title. One that allows him to act in Trump’s name with zero accountability before the other branches of power. It’s the Rasputin Effect. Elonius calls the shots, and Trump makes it official. Why? Because, Elonius Rex has bought and paid for a presidency—just what every megalomaniacal magnate wants, the levers of the most powerful position on earth, without the headaches of having to answer to voters. And he bought it—or is reported at least to have bought it, although perhaps he paid more than we’ll ever know—for the relatively paltry sum of two hundred fifty million dollars.

Sure, that sounds like a lot of money to people like us, who, as my Aunt Marilyn used to say, “are just peckin’ shit with the chickens,” but for Elonius Rex, who accumulates an estimated forty-three thousand dollars a minute, it’s pocket change—or taking Aunt Marilyn’s metaphor to the limit, mere chicken feed. And if the government shuts down, it’s certainly no skin off his teeth: he’s never had to be a federal employee, a soldier, a sailor or any of their family members wondering where their next paycheck will come from; he has no government health benefits for a shutdown to suspend; he isn’t on welfare or Social Security and, I’m sure, has never given a split-second’s thought to how such people survive even with those benefits, let alone without them.

No, for Elonius Rex, this is all a game, and he’s showing Mike Johnson and all the rest of the papier mâché members of the GOP’s mock leadership who the winner is. This is The Apprentice: Super Celebrity Edition, and Elonius Rex is the star of the show. The Don is just holding the mic for him.

Stay tuned…
 

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