3 hours ago
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Naturally I assumed the feeling would pass, but one whole week after the US president turned the lawn of the White House into a crappy car dealership, I keep finding myself feeling … optimistic. I know, I know. But if anything, I find myself feeling a little bit more optimistic every day – and sometimes a lot more. Not for America, which keeps electing him, but for the rest of the world. It really would take a heart of stone for governments from Beijing to Delhi to Warsaw to look at the clip of this old guy trying to sell his friend’s electric cars and not think: “Ooooooooh, that is very, very bad vibes. Still, it’s good for us!”
In China they have ironically nicknamed Trump “the nation builder”, meaning he is doing an incredible, bigly impressive job of bolstering the Chinese nation. Not to be disrespectful to that ancient golf bore holding the little piece of paper listing his car salesman talking points and gibbering “everything is computer”… but can this guy even organise an oligarchy? He’s certainly making his precious stock market run, stricken, in the direction of the nearest bathroom.
As for Trump’s genius henchmogul Elon Musk, Tesla’s share price has halved over the past three months, with the FT reporting today that hedge fund short sellers have made $16.2bn betting against it. Last week a JP Morgan note attempted to contextualise their grimly downgraded outlook for the firm: “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.” Listen, I’ll take their expert word for it. But I feel like even I can think of something similar in the history of the social media industry. Last year the entrepreneur and professor Scott Galloway observed of X since Musk’s purchase of it: “No company over $1bn in revenue has ever lost 60% of its revenues in a 12 month period in a non-war period. I don’t think that’s ever happened. Twitter is literally the worst-performing business in history since a change in ownership.”
Admittedly, as is now clear, X was a political project for Musk, so perhaps that was a strategic haemorrhaging of value. It certainly bought him a keyboard army, albeit one that doesn’t appear to have a whole lot better to do all day than suck anonymously up to him. Indeed, for having the temerity to post this article on X, I expect a number of rape and death threats from Maga folk who are now, like some cowboy-booted modern take on the poor East Germans, being told to buy one type of car. Even worse, it’s one of the electric type, that until very recently they were formally required to dismiss as soyboymobiles. So look, I understand: mandated ideological 180s are very upsetting. And in any case, I always threaten to rape and kill people when I’m winning an argument.
In the weeks after the Trump administration got under way, the pace at which it was smashing, cutting, or walking away from things at first seemed discombobulating, frightening – even tragic. And it remains so for many Americans. But here outside the US, the alternative view is that it has saved many years, potentially decades, of the various factions of the rest of the world dithering away while thinking “Maybe we should get it together? Then again, how would we get it together? We should probably get it together … ” Thanks to the Nation Builder™, everyone is simply having to get it together, and fast. Defence is obviously the toughest issue, and suggesting otherwise is a level of facetiousness to which even this column couldn’t aspire. But it’s not undoable, mainly because it can’t be. Meanwhile, stripping out the various moral dimensions, where is the money really going to flow? Towards countries like the one building factories where they make batteries that can charge a car in five minutes (sorry, Elon) and are so big you have to fly over them – or the one where the leader turned the seat of power into a garage forecourt?
Sometimes you don’t need to be steeped in every economic and geopolitical detail to get a macrotrends gut feeling. Let’s face it, all that the White House lawn spectacle lacked was one of those flailing inflatable tube men that entice/terrify potential customers. And I felt something similar again yesterday, watching the White House press secretary reveal herself as one of those countless modern idiots who have only heard of one war in history (the second world one) – and who don’t even understand that. Yesterday, Karoline Leavitt could be found declaring: “It’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.” Bless! Taking a slightly longer look into history, I think America owed France a favour before it was the other way around. But getting lost in these stoopid yesteryear arguments is not really something winners do, is it? Anyone speaking at the superpower podium should at least give the impression of having bigger fish to fry.
On a local level, I’ve no idea whether the UK will be one of the nations Trump accidentally ends up building. On recent form, and with our proven propensity for taking dumb decisions and electing limited or actively awful leaders, you wouldn’t put a whole load of money on it. But opportunities in a world that America has chosen to put in flux are openly presenting themselves. I can’t help feeling that fortune will favour those who are blithely pushing on with it, not plaintively pushing cars literally in their own back yard.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
