Trump and Musk: Bullshit and Anti-Bullshit

Donald Trump and his senior advisor Elon Musk have much in common. Both are billionaires, share nationalist neoliberal ideas, and have always aspired to be more than mere businessmen. Both have transformed their businesses into brands, and from early on attempted to turn their own personas into pop-culture figures. At the same time, both men are worlds apart. Musk is an early promoter of electric vehicles, an erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis, and an investor in new technologies. Trump is a real estate developer specializing in hotels, casinos, golf courses, and a former reality television star. From this point of view, the combination seems unlikely, but the contrast is a recipe for success. Trump and Musk complement each other.

The divergencies become graphic when analyzing both men’s characters and actions in terms of a concept that has been central to many philosophical studies over the past forty years: the concept of “bullshit.” Trump is famous for radical public statements and on the spot made claims that are often false, and which academia has multiple times attributed to the so-called “post-truth” era. In 1986, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguished bullshit from lying: while the liar tries to hide the truth by covering it under false statements, the bullshitter does not care about the truth and thus works not with radical dissimulations but rather by specializing in “aestheticizing” procedures such as embellishments, vague claims, the denial of facts, and the use of simplifying binary logic. [1] Works examining Trump’s statements and personality in terms of “bullshit” as defined by Frankfurt are indeed numerous. [2]

Bullshit and Anti-Bullshit

Musk’s recent activities can be related to another important academic book on bullshit, though in a diametrically opposed fashion: David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. [3] In his book from 2018, the anthropologist postulates that over half of societal work is pointless and narcissistic and could as well be abolished. Graeber interviewed hundreds of workers to come to this conclusion. There is an uncanny connection with Musk’s “governmental efficiency campaign” that is conceived as a war against the “tyranny of bureaucracy” and Graeber’s anti-bullshit philosophy. In his role as a presidential advisor, Musk already got rid of 10% of the U.S. 2.3 million-strong American federal workforce. After taking over Twitter (now X), Musk cut down the employee headcount from 7,500 to 1,500. Such projects can be interpreted as a fight against bullshit jobs, and his supporters may well agree with this view. I am not suggesting that there really were bullshit-jobs; nor does this relativize the fact that Musk often makes “bullshit statements” similar to Trump. What matters for the conception of the “Musk brand” is that it has incorporated in its methodology a strong anti-bullshit element.

Paradoxical fusions of opposites such as these can be observed in other domains of the new American politics, and they are supported by the bullshit/anti-bullshit logic. Musk is neoliberal-reasonable: cutting costs and relying on the natural forces of the market corresponds to Hayek’s and Friedman’s principles, because basically, neoliberalism considers state governance bullshit. By contrast, Trump’s tariffs are the opposite of neoliberal. The neoliberal approach to the integration of the world’s economies emphasizes free market competition, and a large part of the globalized economy is supported by these principles. Trump is happily abolishing them in the name of a word that he advertises as a magic spell: tariffs. His strategy looks much more like alchemy used by religious sects: he believes to have found a trick that is valid even when – of just because – it contradicts most economic reasoning. In a word, it is bullshit.

Isolationalism and Extractionism

Another occurrence of the bullshit/anti-bullshit logic is the combination of isolationism and extractionism. Trump subscribes to a brand of isolationism that has its roots in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which opposed colonization. At the time, one meant the colonization of America by European powers. While the US was isolating itself from Europe, it would still interfere in foreign countries, for example in 1898 in Cuba during its war for independence from Spain. Spain also ceded Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the U.S. in exchange for $20 million. The Trump administration engages in a similarly peculiar kind of “isolationism.” Reducing expenditures in world affairs and concentrating on the American continent (which might include Greenland), Trump has abandoned the longstanding American strategy of global engagement. He eliminated 90% of the U.S. foreign aid contracts and withdrew from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The increase of tariffs to levels last seen in 1945 can be seen as an isolationist program. Isolationism is driven by the strong desire to deny the complex web of relationships between oneself and the global other, and to exclusively concentrate on the economy, values, and ideas of one’s home nation. In times of Trump and Brexit, isolationism stands for a romantic political vision of self-determining nations that attempt to be culturally purer. Within this logic, the idea to conquer neighboring countries does not contradict the idea of isolationism but even reinforces it. With Canada and Greenland incorporated, the US can even better isolate oneself from the rest of the world. The bigger the country, the better it can survive in isolation.

The problem is that even an isolated country occasionally needs resources from other geographical areas. Since isolationism reduces contacts with faraway countries, the alternative is extractionism. Extractionism is a practice known from mafia environments: it means taking resources without giving anything in return. Instead of giving people political or economic incentives to make deals from which both sides can benefit, extractionism just threatens and takes. Extractionism does not colonize because it does not intend to establish a political “colonizing” framework. Trump’s proposals concerning Ukrainian minerals that he submitted to Ukrainian president Zelensky is such an example of extractionism.

Again, we can observe the peculiar combination of bullshit and anti-bullshit. Isolationism, accompanied by the idea of making a country great again, is bullshit because it cannot work in a complex world determined by alliances and interdependences. This is why the “no-bullshit” option of extractionism is presented in parallel. Nothing is more anti-bullshit than extractionism: it does not believe in contracts, relationships, responsibilities, interdependences, friendships, or possibilities, and considers all these bullshit. Extractionism also contradicts all forms of sustainability, and it is not surprising that Trump revokes alternative energy plans: he wants to extract energy from the ground of his own country.

The isolationism-extractionism pattern mirrors the Trump-Musk logic. In the administration, Musk is not acting within a web of socio-political responsibilities that politicians usually feel obliged to respect, at least to some degree. As a non-politician, he has a simple vision of politics determined by neoliberal nationalism, which comes close to extractionism by nature. The idea of seeing a country as a company, which supports the neoliberal concept, is a form of extractionism. Musk extracts resources from the American state and the American people by cutting down their services. In his companies, Musk has imposed extreme working hours and intense pressure on his teams: he treats his companies and the entire US as entities from which one can extract as much as possible.

It matters less whether his measures are justified or not; what matters most are the methods he applies, and these methods are extractive. Just like Trump has given up on what former Treasury Secretary Yellen once called “friendshoring” [4] as a way to ensure sourcing, Musk does not seem to care about the potentially disastrous long-term political consequences of his cuts. His reforms are not meant to be political reforms in the first place because for an extractionist, politics, as well as diplomacy, is basically bullshit. What matters is “the deal,” which is basically about “no bullshit”: force and pressure.

Notes

[1] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), first published in Raritan Quarterly Review 6, no. 2 (1986): 81–100 (52). Citations are from the book and hereafter abbreviated Frankfurt.

[2] Among these publications are: Bernd Kaussler; Lars J. Kristiansen and Jeffrey Delbert. 2020. Rhetoric and Governance under Trump: Proclamations from the Bullshit Pulpit. Lexington; Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul. 2022. “Bald-faced Bullshit and Authoritarian Political Speech: Making Sense of Johnson and Trump” in Laurence R. Horn (ed.), From Lying to Perjury. Berlin: De Gruyter-Mouton; James Ball. 2018. Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World. Hull: Biteback; Cassam, Qassim. 2021. "Bullshit, Post-truth, and Propaganda" in Elizabeth Edenberg and Michael Hannon (eds.), Political Epistemology. Oxford University Press; Alison MacKenzie and Ibrar Bhatt. 2020. “Lies, Bullshit and Fake News” in Postdigital Science and Education 2, 1–8.

[3] David Graeber. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster.

[4] US Department of the Treasury. “Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on Economic Resilience in Hanoi, Vietnam” July 21, 2023 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1639#