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'Zero Self-Awareness': Musk Invokes Soros While 'Literally' Bribing People to Vote in Wisconsin
"The world's richest Nazi, Elon Musk, claims hecklers are paid Soros operatives while he literally bribes people to vote for the fascist, far-right candidates of his choosing."
Mar 31, 2025
World's richest man and top Trump lieutenant Elon Musk was heckled during a rally in Wisconsin on Sunday—and subsequently roasted online once the clip emerged—for saying those who shouted him down were paid operatives of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a boogie man of right-wingers in the U.S. who claim he's the funding source and puppet master of the nation's left opposition.
The moment was especially rich optically as Musk was in Green Bay ahead of Tuesday's pivotal state supreme court elections, in which the Musk-backed Brad Schimel, the Republican choice, faces off against Democratic favorite Susan Crawford. As part of his deep-pocketed efforts to get Schimel elected, Musk gave $1 million checks away at Sunday night's rally to compel them to vote—a tactic critics have denounced as openly corrupt and a blatant form of illegal vote-buying.
"It was inevitable at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience," Musk said from the stage after heckling came from the audience. Laughing, he added, “Give my regards to George. Say 'Hi' to George for me."
Musk responds to being heckled: it was inevitable at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience. Give my regards to George. Say hi to George for me. pic.twitter.com/2sGiaDfwTm
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2025
"Sorry—is Elon Musk attacking George Soros... while he's literally buying an election in Wisconsin... the exact thing that Republicans baselessly claim that George Soros does?" asked Brian Tyler Cohen, a political commentator.
"Showing ZERO self-awareness," added social justice activist and musician Bill Madden, "the world's richest Nazi, Elon Musk, claims hecklers are paid Soros operatives while he literally bribes people to vote for the fascist, far-right candidates of his choosing."
And journalist Krystal Ball quipped: "Pretending like they are paid Soros operatives while you are LITERALLY THERE TO BRIBE PEOPLE TO VOTE!"
As the victor in Tuesday's contest between Schimel and Crawford will determine the ideological bent of the state's highest court, the implications for the outcome could not be higher. With Musk putting himself at the center of the story, including the tens of millions of dollars he has pumped in the race, many now see it as a referendum on Musk as well as President Trump.
"Trump has already put America's richest people in charge of dismantling the U.S. government, exacting supposed savings from programs that mostly benefit those most in need to help extend the tax cuts for the rich that are expiring later this year," wroteCapital Times columnist Dave Zweifel on Monday.
"Thwarting this duo's brazen attempt to use Wisconsin to sanction their methods would go a long way to signal the people's disgust," he said.
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Authoritarian Clickbait: Trump’s Spectacle Distracts From His Corporate Power Grab
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history.
Mar 24, 2025
Traditionally, authoritarian regimes were defined by their capacity to control information. Critics were silenced, press outlets were shuttered, and opposition voices were imprisoned or worse. Power was exercised through fear, secrecy, and violence. But in President Donald Trump’s America, authoritarianism has evolved. It no longer hides behind walls of censorship—it thrives in plain sight.
Trump’s political style isn’t about suppressing attention. It’s about seizing it. Whether threatening to annex Greenland “one way or another,” mocking Canada as the “51st state,” or pressuring Columbia University to abandon free speech protections, the goal isn’t to avoid controversy. The aim is to create it.
In Trump’s case, the provocation is the point.
This shift reflects a deeper transformation in how power is exercised in the 21st century. In a world governed by algorithms, virality, and information overload, authoritarianism no longer seeks silence—it seeks spectacle. Trump’s provocations are not mere outbursts. They are designed and timed to dominate headlines, crowd out serious scrutiny, and keep the public in a state of reactive agitation.
These performances are not without precedent. But in Trump’s case, the provocation is the point. His administration has leaned into fascist-style imagery, with symbolic salutes, rallies drenched in nationalism, and open threats against political dissidents—both foreign and domestic. But this isn't authoritarianism for the sake of totalitarian control. It’s authoritarianism repurposed for an attention economy—where outrage drives clicks, and distraction enables deeper, quieter abuses of power.
The Distraction Machine: Authoritarianism in the Age of Virality
In previous generations, authoritarian leaders worried about hiding abuses. Trump, by contrast, seems to invite public attention to his most outrageous behavior—not in spite of its controversy, but precisely because of it.
What happens when Trump threatens journalists? When his administration cracks down on campus protests, or fans conspiracy theories about foreign states? The media—both traditional and social—explodes with takes, outrage, and analysis. These cycles create a spectacle that consumes public attention. And while Americans are arguing over whether Trump’s statements are ironic, dangerous, or “just trolling,” his administration is quietly enacting policies that concentrate wealth and corporate power behind the scenes.
This is by design. When Trump publicly praised authoritarian leaders while floating the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, or when he staged a militarized inauguration complete with nationalist salutes and fascist-style imagery, outrage predictably dominated headlines and flooded social media. While commentators debated the symbolic threats to democracy, far less attention was paid to the administration’s simultaneous efforts to expand fossil fuel drilling, dismantle environmental protections, and push through financial deregulations that directly benefit corporate donors and billionaire allies.
This is the sleight of hand that defines contemporary authoritarian populism. Performative controversies act as bait. While political opponents and the press react to each new provocation, policy moves quietly. Headlines focus on Trump’s tone, but not his taxes; on his insults, but not his infrastructure contracts; on his speeches, but not his subsidies.
As Trump escalates mass deportations, including the forced removal of immigrants to El Salvador, the moves are framed as tough-on-crime, anti-immigrant theater—crafted to energize his base and dominate the media cycle through performative spectacle. But behind the headlines, there are real victims: parents separated from children, asylum-seekers denied due process, and vulnerable people sent back to life-threatening conditions. At the same time, while public attention is consumed by immigration crackdowns, the administration is quietly advancing energy deals and deregulation efforts that benefit economic elites.
Rather than suppressing debate, Trump drowns it in noise. His style weaponizes the velocity of modern media, not to clarify public discourse, but to overwhelm it. And in that chaos, the structure of governance shifts: away from democratic accountability, and toward unregulated corporate control.
Authoritarian Theater, Corporate Power
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history. The façade of populism masks a policy agenda deeply aligned with corporate elites, billionaire donors, and the industries that stand to gain from the dismantling of public regulation and oversight.
Tax policy remains one of the clearest examples. The tax law passed during Trump’s first term overwhelmingly favored the wealthy, while doing little to stimulate broad-based economic growth. Now, in his return to power, he’s doubling down. His 2025 budget proposal slashes funding for housing, food assistance, and healthcare. Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk gleefully proclaim they’re slashing government waste in the name of efficiency, yet remain conspicuously silent on the bloated corporate excesses of defense spending—where billions vanish into unaccountable contracts, overpriced weapons, and Pentagon boondoggles cloaked in patriotic branding.
The U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy.
Trump’s cabinet and advisory circle are drawn from the ultra-rich—CEOs, private equity barons, and political megadonors. The revolving door between his administration and industries like oil, finance, and private prisons ensures that public policy is crafted not to serve the electorate, but to entrench elite interests. The prison industry, in particular, has seen surging stock prices and expanding contracts as Trump ramps up deportation efforts and privatizes detention infrastructure.
Energy policy tells the same story. While the administration rails against international climate accords and environmental “wokeness,” it is quietly threatening to sell off public lands and roll back environmental policies as a windfall for the fossil fuel industries. The beneficiaries are not small businesses or working Americans. They are multinational corporations and a handful of ultra-wealthy shareholders.
This isn’t an accidental byproduct of Trumpism—it is its core. Despite branding himself as anti-elite, Trump’s political machine is funded and sustained by America’s richest families and corporate lobbies. His alliance with figures like Elon Musk reflects a broader trend: the convergence of authoritarian populism with a new form of oligarchic capitalism—one where billionaires publicly attack “the establishment” in order to pursue their own profitable agenda.
As inequality deepens and democratic norms erode, the U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy. This is the new authoritarianism—not built on repression alone, but on distraction, deregulation, and the strategic manipulation of spectacle.
Looking Beyond the Noise
Donald Trump’s political style is often dismissed as chaotic or unserious—a constant stream of tweets, outbursts, and provocations. But behind that chaos lies a deliberate structure: a feedback loop of distraction and policy, performance and power.
What looks like madness is often method. The attention-consuming controversies, the culture war posturing, the outlandish threats and statements—all function to consume public focus while his administration executes a radical, elite-centered program of capitalist plundering.
The real danger of Trumpism is not just what he says and does, but what it prevents us from seeing. As media cycles churn and social media outrage erupts, entire layers of policy are being written to serve corporate interests, privatize public goods, and redirect national wealth upward.
This isn’t just about optics or inflammatory rhetoric—it is a substantive and growing form of authoritarianism. Trump is using real tools of state power to target dissent, intimidate opposition, and punish vulnerable communities, turning repression into a political strategy. From aggressive crackdowns on student protesters to the mass deportation of immigrant families, these actions are not symbolic—they are deliberate mechanisms to consolidate control and clear the path for a hyper-capitalist plutocratic agenda. The victims are real, and the consequences are structural, not theatrical.
To resist this model of governance, we must not only confront its authoritarian aesthetics and the very real victims it creates—but expose its oligarchic foundation. It requires dismantling the capitalist plutocracy that thrives within—and actively sustains—this viral authoritarian political and media culture. That means cutting through the noise, tracking the money, and asking not just what Trump is doing, but who is benefiting too often in the shadows while the cameras roll.
In the end, Trumpism thrives not on silence but on spectacle—a new model of power built on authoritarian clickbait, where outrage fuels distraction, and distraction clears the path for profiteering.
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Trump 2.0: A First-Class Shock-and-Awe Experience
It is remarkable that a single figure could become responsible for potentially the greatest bankruptcy of all—the ending of the American Century (as we once knew it) and even, after a fashion, humanity’s centuries on Planet Earth.
Mar 20, 2025
Yes, “shock and awe” is back in the second age of Donald Trump. His border czar, Tom Homan, used that very phrase to describe border policy from day one of the new administration and, whether the president has actually said it or not, it’s now regularly in headlines, op-eds, and so much else. If you remember, it was the phrase used, in all its glory, to describe America’s massive bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003. (You remember! The country that supposedly threatened us with nuclear weapons but, in fact, didn’t have any!)
We Americans were, of course, going to shock and awe them. But from that moment on (if not from the moment, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when, rather than simply going after Osama bin Laden and crew, President George W. Bush launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan), you could say that it was we who were truly shocked and awed. After all, in their own disastrous fashion, our post-9/11 wars prepared the way for… yes!… Donald Trump to take the White House the first time around (shock and awe!)—and then blame the final disastrous retreat of the American military from Afghanistan in 2021 on the Biden administration. (“Kamala Harris, Joe Biden—the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”) And of course, four years later, his reelection on a functional platform of Trump First, Americans Last, was distinctly a double shock and awe!
Tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him.
And if you’ll excuse my being thoroughly repetitious, that was—or at least should have been seen as—the true definition of shock and awe. Donald Trump! Twice! Even now, can you truly take it in? In fact, more or less every moment since his reelection victory in November 2024 has been—pardon me for the turn of phrase—a first-class S&A experience.
And—shock, if not awe—I haven’t even mentioned Elon Musk yet, have I? I mean, who can take him in either? The richest man on Planet Earth (S&A!) and, at least until President Trump levied those massive tariffs on our three major trading partners (only to partially back off soon after), still making money hand over fist (wrist, pissed?)—about $224 billion extra dollars (S&A!) just between the November 2024 election victory of Donald Trump and the moment he actually took power again in January 2025—at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, he’s been more or less running this country (into the ground) hand in glove with Donald Trump, who, by the way, is already talking about a possible third term in office! (“They say I can’t run again; that’s the expression… Then somebody said, I don’t think you can. Oh.”) Now, wouldn’t that be an all-American S&A first (or do I mean last?)!
An MMMW World
Phew, I’m already out of breath and exclamation points! No surprise there, of course, given the awesomely shocking and shockingly Trumpified (or do I mean Muskratted?) world we’re now living in and dealing with.
After all, we once again have a president who himself is (or may be—since you never know with him) a multi-billionaire and has at his side the DOGE-y man with a totally made-up position and an organization that nonetheless seems to have the power to dismantle whole parts of our government. (Science? Medicine? Who needs them? Veterans, who cares?) He could evidently even purchase Mars (and donate his sperm to help colonize that planet). And imagine this: Despite all the dough they and their billionaire pals possess—there are at least 13 of them in his administration, worth something like $460 billion—Elon and he seem intent on shoving through Congress a plan that would make his tax cuts for billionaires a permanent feature of American life (whatever it may cost the rest of us).
Don’t try to tell me that we’re not in a mad, mad, mad world (MMMW, if you prefer). And hey, the man who only recently set a record by spending more than an hour and 40 minutes giving the longest State of the (Dis)Union speech or speech of any sort ever to a joint session of Congress has done a remarkable job of foisting his version of an America First (Foist? Last?) policy on the rest of us and this world—a world that distinctly isn’t ours, but his. Think of us as now living in a Trump First World, or TFW. Of course, his version of America First includes those recent tariffs (some but not all of which have been delayed again) that, though officially levied against Canada, China, and Mexico, were actually being foisted on the rest of us. Count on one thing: In the end, we will undoubtedly pay through the nose for them. So, no question about it, we have certainly entered a distinctly S&A era.
The Double D of Donald
In truth, the 45th and 47th ( and 48th and 49th?) president of the United States is a genuinely remarkable figure. Truly historic—or do I mean hysteric? After all, who can’t bring some image of him to mind at any moment? That face, that stare, that glare, that red tie, that wave in his hair. Need I say more?
In his own remarkable fashion, he should be given full credit and a double capital D—for both Donald and Decline. Or just think of him as PD (for President Decline). And it is remarkable that a single figure, one man who once oversaw the bankruptcy of six different companies he had launched, could become responsible for potentially the greatest bankruptcy of all—the ending of the American Century (as we once knew it) and even, after a fashion, humanity’s centuries on Planet Earth.
I mean, who can even remember anymore the time in a distant century—the year was 1991, to be exact, the very moment when Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy for the Trump Taj Mahal and the year before he did the same for the Trump Plaza Hotel—when the Soviet Union went into the garbage pail, China had not yet truly risen, and this country was left alone as not just a great power but The Great Power or TGP, the only one left on Planet Earth? That, in retrospect, was a truly shock-and-awe moment. And isn’t it no less shock-and-awing to think that a mere 34 years later, that same country is now led by a raging maniac on an America First platform that could, in effect, prove to be an America Last one? In a mere two terms in office, he will have taken what was once known as the planet’s “sole superpower” into a world of chaos and, ultimately, disaster of a sort we still can’t really grasp. He will have been the monarch—and yes, that’s the appropriate word, not president—from hell. (In fact, the White House digital strategy team all too appropriately produced a portrait of President Trump with a golden crown and the phrase “LONG LIVE THE KING”!)
And if that (and he) isn’t the definition of shock and awe, what is?
Burn, Baby, Burn
Worse yet, tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him. Think of it as little short of remarkable that, in a world in which every month, every year (and every decade) is hotter than the previous one in a record fashion, in a world in which the weather and its devastating effects—from fires to storms to floods—is only growing more extreme and more horrific, Americans freely voted in (a second time around!) someone whose election phrase of choice was “drill, baby, drill,” but might as well have been “heat, baby, heat” or “storm, baby, storm,” or simply “burn, baby, burn.”
And if his platform was America First (but truly Donald First), it distinctly should have been Planet Earth Last. (Of course—don’t be shocked—he also appointed as secretary of health a man who thinks that the way to fight measles outbreaks is with anything but a vaccine.) Yes, above all else, Donald Trump, who has called climate change both a “scam” and a “Chinese hoax,” continues to be focused on making sure that ever more oil, natural gas, and coal comes out of the ground and is indeed burned, baby, burned forever and a day.
Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!
Of course, no one should be surprised, given the way the fossil fuel companies funded his campaign. He’s already gone out of his way to cancel anything the Biden administration did to fight climate change and announced the country’s departure from the Paris climate accords (again). As The New York Timesput it recently, “In a few short weeks [of his second term in office], President Trump has already severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.” What he’s doing is now considered a “deep freeze” on climate programs of all sorts (though it might better be thought of as a hot melt).
At one point, he was even talking about eliminating 65% of the employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (S&A!). Lasting implications indeed.
In any other era, President Trump would still undoubtedly have been considered a nightmare and a half, but not a potentially world-ending one (at least the world as humanity has known it all these endless centuries). The truth is that, once upon a time, if you had told anybody that this would be our S&A version of the future, you would have been laughed out of the room.
The Second Time Around with No End in Sight
And yet, there can be no question that, all these years later, despite bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and failure after failure, he remains the man of the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Give him credit. It’s a remarkable record not just when it comes to the success of failure but of putting Himself (and yes, under the circumstances, I do think that should be capitalized!), not America First.
Oh, and while all of this has been going on, the Democratic Party has not completely but largely been missing in action. Imagine that! And as for Congress, remind me what it is (other than an audience for You Know Who).
Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!
Worse yet, if all of us hadn’t actually lived through the Trumpian epoch (epic? toothpick?), I don’t think anyone could have made this up or, in a previous version of America, even imagined it happening. And if they could, there can be little question that they would simply have been laughed out of the room, if not institutionalized, not once but twice.
And yet here we are, the second time around with no end in sight, and a third time a history-breaking possibility, leaving us fully and thoroughly in another America on another planet. Phew! Talk about shock and awe!
I must admit, with at least three years and 10 months to go in the era of You Know Who, I find it hard to imagine our future, even if (as is certainly possible) the American and global economies go down the tubes and the Democrats are swept back into Congress—I’m sorry, where?—in 2026.
Nonetheless, for the (un)foreseeable future, we’re all living with Donald Trump in a genuinely shock-and-awe world of almost unpredictable strangeness. In some fashion, all of us are now Afghans or Iraqis.
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