They're wrong about Musk's third party*

Just as "authenticity" was used most often by the least authentic voices as p.r. repair, "transparency" is now deployed with great frequency by those in charge of secret police, opaque criminal investigations, and blindingly incomprehensible government policies. But I'm being Webster-transparent in expressing, with emphasis, my belief that Elon Musk is despicable.

That needed clarity before proceeding; and again, not in Dick Nixon's Let-me-be-perfectly-clear kind of way. Also unlike Vito Corleone, I really would swear on the souls of my grandchildren (if I had any) that Elon Musk is a loathsome being. He's a racist, a bully, a braggart, a public leech, a remorseless downsizer and a megalomaniac glory-seeker.

All of which makes him ideal for a third party. And that makes the prospect's detractors dead wrong.

They scoff that Musk's principal followers are mostly young men disillusioned by politics, the long-disgruntled type. To which it must be noted: That's nearly the entire point behind a third party's establishment — motivating those who've been psychologically detached from political participation to get out and vote.

Detractors then swing to other sneering. Motivate them with what? There, they say, Musk falls way short; his third-party objectives run from the vague to the unutterably mysterious. That he would need to sharpen a political message is unquestioned, yet fixable and twofold. The debt. Protest.

Musk's online disciples understand government debt and deficit spending as well as he does, which is to say, not at all. The point here being: Throughout democracy's history, rabble-rousing the yokelry over issues they neither grasp nor strive to grasp has been, and shall always be, a demagogically honored and successful strategy. (Ask any Republican, once shot full of sodium pentathol.)

Musk's concomitant rationale for a third party is, simply, a means by which to expressly protest the perceived dreadfulness of both major parties — perceived, in that the alienated yokelry mistakenly sees them as indistinguishable. Good for them, since that's good for a third party. Hammering the misperception would appeal as well to quasi partisans who do vote, halfheartedly.

The naysayers also point out the procedural problem of ballot access for those who dare to tread in the byzantine frontier of state election laws written by pols who find a wannabe-third party's meddling in their incumbency rather objectionable. This particular naysaying I find particularly puzzling.

Not that this would be relevant to Musk, but even stupendously looney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. managed to get on 46 state ballots last year as a presidential candidate. Well then what about Musk's non-presidential angle? I read one skeptic venture that accumulating the massive number of signatures needed to qualify for 435 congressional contests would itself be quite a challenge — and more than that, the effort would cost upward of $50 million, he exclaimed.

This the skeptic observed about a man who spent more than $250 million on only one contest in 2024, almost $300 million total, and whose net worth, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, is close to $400 billion.

Aside from the question of cost — which is altogether irrelevant — Musk's third party would engage only a handful of House and two or three Senate races. Hence my puzzlement about the immense difficulty of signature gathering in hundreds of congressional districts. Not his problem.

He also has the option of circumventing third-party formation and going directly with one in existence and already on ballots, most suitably the Libertarian Party. That or some similar move would be wise in New York, at least, where state law prohibits party names containing "America," as would Musk's.

Its overall purpose would be to act as a spoiler, nothing more. Perhaps a better word is Trump's favorite: retaliation. I've read a dozen or more commentaries snickering at the idea of Musk in any way hurting Trump — that the latter, through the weighty power of his office, would crush the gone-roguer in whatever attempt at political regicide he might make.

That much is obvious. Such commentaries slyly evade discussion of Musk's true aim. Which is, or would be, not dethroning Trump but assuring that he's deprived of congressional majorities. And that, in some races, just enough races, would require tipping election results by only a point or two.

Scuttlebutt from the Musk camp is that an evangelizing super PAC would antedate a third party's establishment, a way to sort of grease the skids. And antedating that would be Musk's seething desire to retaliate against a fellow racist, bully, braggart, public leech, remorseless downsizer and megalomaniac glory-seeker.

I'd love it.

*This piece is cross-posted at my Substack page. You can subscribe to it for free. Or — my preference — subscribe to it for $5 a month. Either way, you'd receive an email when a new post is up; no more than that, ever, I don't harvest email addresses for financial solicitations.