Trump and Musk: the Shakespearean merry billionaires of Washington

It has been a fun holiday game. Social media have been full of images showing Donald Trump as Elon Musk’s servant: bringing him drinks in the Oval Office; cleaning his car windscreen; polishing his shoes. The president-elect even added to the fun by saying at a press conference at Mar a Lago that Musk cannot in fact aspire to being president as he was not born in the United States. Shakespeare could not have put it better: Trump “doth protest too much, methinks,” as the great playwright had a character say in “Hamlet” in response to a revealing over-reaction.

There are many uncertainties about Trump’s second term in the White House, but one of the biggest is the question of how this duet between Trump and Musk will develop. To stay with Shakespeare, it could remain a comedy, perhaps under the title of “The Merry Billionaires of Washington,” from Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” But it could easily become a tragedy.

One of the paradoxes of supposedly anti-elite populism is how attractive Trump is to other billionaires, who one might imagine would be epitomes of the hated elite. Indeed, America is home to more than 800 billionaires and as Trump has announced his nominations for his cabinet and other posts during the past month it has often seemed as if every single one of those 800 billionaires might be joining his government.

The paradox is easily resolved, however. Billionaires feel at home with each other because their huge wealth gives them an independence of thought and action that allows them to admire each other personally and interact easily, rather like the wealthy aristocrats of past centuries.

Many also share a belief that government acts as a constraint on their wealth and their actions that they