Letter From America - Bromance Showmance!

I’m sorry, Elon, but the bromance won’t last.

Haven’t you seen the bodies of your predecessors scattered around the halls of power in the United States?

We saw you cavorting on stage next to your icon, Donald Trump. You could barely contain yourself. It was a shameful sight, your bare belly sticking out from under your T-shirt.

We all know there’s a bromance going on between you and the Trump, because we saw the dowry that went with it.

We saw Trump, too, with his platitudes as he paid tribute to you. “Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star,” he said, “a star is born!”

But don’t you know, Elon, that there’s only room for one star in the Trumpian White House, and that star isn’t you?

Ministry of Silly Walks?

While we’re at it, what about the Department of Government Efficiency? For some reason, that title reminds me of a comedy sketch from the classic Monty Python comedy series, but in particular the sketch about the Ministry of Silly Walks, a scathing satire on bureaucratic inefficiency in the British government. Truth is better than fiction, no doubt! Anyway, as I understand it, Trump created this Department as a wedding present for you. Oh, and you will have a co-head in the department - Vivek Ramaswamy! This is not actually a real department, despite all appearances, but an advisory agency outside the Government that will advise Trump on how to cut $2 trillion from the Federal Government budget. Don't you know that's a Sisyphean task? You don't have to be a genius to see that. And you set yourself an impossible goal – what were you smoking? Wait – I know, didn’t I see you smoking weed on the ‘Joe Rogan’ podcast.

Anyway, as I understand it, Trump created this Department as a wedding present for you. Oh, and you will have a co-head in the department - Vivek Ramaswamy! This is not actually a real department, despite all appearances, but an advisory agency outside the Government that will advise Trump on how to cut $2 trillion from the Federal Government budget. Don't you know that's a Sisyphean task? You don't have to be a genius to see that. And you set yourself an impossible goal – what were you smoking? Wait – I know, didn’t I see you smoking weed on the ‘Joe Rogan’ podcast.

The Federal Government has a budget of $6.75 trillion. The budget is divided into two parts: mandatory spending and discretionary spending. Mandatory spending, as Trump himself has declared, cannot be cut, for what it’s worth. In that category, are programs such as: health (Medicare and others): 28%; Social Security: 21%; Defense: 18% and repayment of the national debt: 14%. That’s 81% of the Federal budget, or almost $5.5 trillion of the $6.75. Even if you cut everything in the discretionary budget (veteran benefits, transportation, agriculture, unemployment benefits and housing assistance and more), you would only cut $1.25 trillion. And you wouldn’t have a chance of doing something like that in the first place.

Slaves wanted!

Elon, I saw that you were recruiting employees to do this impossible task. I read your job ad on ‘X’: “Looking for small government revolutionaries, with high IQs, who are willing to work 80+ hours a week on unattractive cost-cutting.” Well, isn’t that a great plan – hiring smart people for free, working for the richest person in the world, to fire giving government employees. Don’t you agree that that plan seems very strange?

Your colleague is cracked too. Ramaswamy proposes to fire to over a million and a half civil service employees – that’s 75% of them – on a presidential edict. You two are smoking weed together – am I right?

Your predecessors’ corpses

I have not forgotten the corpses and I will tell you about them now. Around the turn of the 20th century, Andrew Carnegie spent a lot of money to support Republican Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Carnegie was the richest man in the world at the time. Does that remind you of anything? It is no wonder, then, that he expected a major role as an advisor in the Government when Roosevelt took over the presidency, after McKinley's assassination. Carnegie made a lot of suggestions to Roosevelt, but Roosevelt's response to them was complete silence. And what about the other Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and his bromance with William Randalph Hearst in 1932? Hearst gave Roosevelt all kinds of help, both financial and with propaganda. When Roosevelt was elected president, Hearst had suggestions for him regarding Cabinet ministers and an economic recovery plan. Do you know what happened? Yes, nothing! Hearst got no response from Roosevelt. If you think that wouldn’t happen to you, maybe it’s time to think again, and maybe it’s time to light a doobie!

You told Trump about ‘Twitter/X’, didn’t you? Saying that you made drastic cuts there, so it would be easy for you to do the same to the Federal Government. It’s true that you laid off 80% of your workforce, after you bought Twitter for $44 billion. But what is the market value of ‘X’ now? Oh, my goodness, didn’t that big financial company ‘Fidelity’ say that ‘X’ now has a market value of only $9.4 billion – which means that ‘X’ has lost 80% of its market value. But you cut ‘X’ by the same amount – 80%! So, you didn’t make any difference to the efficiency of the company, but X lost and therefore you lost, $34.6 billion in the process – well done! Good luck in your new job improving the efficiency of the Federal Government!

Postscript

A word in your ear! You may not know it, but the mass deportation of illegal immigrants will begin in January, so you don’t have much time to achieve your goal in the Department of Government Efficiency. If you fire the employees responsible for this mass deportation operation beforehand, you will be ‘alright’. After all, the whole world knows that you yourself started out as an illegal immigrant in the United States. In any case, be careful!

.

.

.

.

.

.