Musk’s Twitter move could be his presidential pitch to conservatives

Last Updated on August 6, 2023, 2:51 AM | Published: December 14, 2022

In the long game, Americans should not fear what is happening to Twitter under Elon Musk. We should be concerned about him becoming President of the United States. 

This sounds insane at first, not to mention constitutionally prohibited — we’ll get to that later. But by setting Twitter on fire with hate speech and upending its social contracts, Musk is amassing a following of glassy-eyed worshipers who see chaos as an opportunity. 

When Donald Trump descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, and announced his candidacy for President of the United States, not many people gave him much of a shot at all. He remained a joke to progressives while he coalesced his following, and it was disconcerting for many of us when he found enough rural conservatives, gun blowhards, megachurch members and fascistic maniacs to put him over the top. 

So, that happened. A real, honest-to-God sociopath became president. What if a person just as narcissistically delusional but more than 200 times richer than Trump became president thanks to a nearly endless supply of cash, ego and breathless media attention? 

Cluelessness from the blue-chip media companies should already be concerning. On Dec. 10, The New York Times published a soft-brained political analysis piece seemingly designed to question conventional wisdom at the expense of clarity. Its headline? “What are the politics of Elon Musk? It’s complicated.” The column by Jeremy Peters then went on to posit that, in the past, Musk has contributed to Democratic candidates, presumably making it harder to pin him down. 

These same things were said about Trump in 2016, and Peters’ newspaper led the way in the mainstream media creating false equivalencies between Trump and Hilary Clinton. Furthermore, Peters’ unhelpful column was laid to waste when Musk posted “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” on Twitter just a few hours later.

That is a lot of flat-earth hate wrapped up in five words. Musk dehumanized the trans community while stoking the stupidity of anti-vaxx, anti-government goons. It was like a valentine to Jan. 6 rioters, a Trumpian hate medley to make Trumpists fall in love with Musk. 

Why would a multi-billionaire like Musk want to be President of the United States? Well, if you could be in control of the largest economy in the world while diluting the power of that  government to regulate business, you could set up one hell of an oligarchical rule. Since Musk tweeted in October that Ukraine should be more compliant with Russia and just cede the Crimea, it is not much of a stretch to say that Musk is cozy with Vladimir Putin and much more on his economic level than Trump. 

That natural-born citizen clause

Now, what about the natural-born citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution? This is, of course, the clause that bans foreign-born citizens like Musk from becoming president or vice president. It is widely considered the bulwark against having foreign assets, or a “Manchurian Candidate,” from holding the highest office, but that did not stop the late U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch from proposing the Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment in 2003. 

The proposed amendment was an opportunistic gambit written with one person in mind: Arnold Schwarzenegger. That year, Schwarzenegger was elected as the Republican governor of California. Hatch thought that having a President Schwarzenegger would lead to permanent rule by his party, and he was willing to change the Constitution to make it happen. 

The amendment died in the Senate Judiciary Committee, but that was a generation ago. There are now far more people willing to debase themselves at the altar of permanent rule, and a billionaire troll who speaks the language of division is extremely attractive to the party of wedge issues. 

Two years ago, Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, published two columns in favor of reviving the Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment: one in August 2020 on Reason.com, then one the following month in USA Today. Somin argued that passing such a bill might be difficult, given the Republican “descent into anti-immigrant xenophobia.” 

But “anti-immigrant xenophobia” is a Republican tool for winning elections. If the man who recently stopped being the richest person in the world were to suddenly align with the party’s hatred, as he did with his Fauci/pronouns tweet, the Republicans would sell out the Constitution in half a heartbeat and the United States of America could be on a fast track to Putinism.

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