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The Cruelty Is the Point: Elon Musk Starts Acting Like His BFF Trump, Now He’s Mocking the Disabled (and Enjoying It!)

How long until MAGA finds a way to say that's not what he was doing?

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Elon Musk is now actually emulating Donald Trump, if you can believe it. He took exception to a blind man testifying against DOGE before Congress last week, and picked the blindness as the thing to focus on.

Are you guys angry yet? I know I try to keep it light around here, cracking jokes and making wry observations about the cruelty that’s become commonplace in the Trump era.

But I have to level with you: I’m pretty pissed. Without going on an expletive-laden rant, I will say that I’ve been getting progressively angrier for the last ten years. And it’s been in a way that I didn’t realize politics could do to me way back in 2015.

All the way back then, I thought that there was no way Trump was going to get the nomination. I thought the tape of him bragging about his ability to sexually assault women on a whim just because he’s famous would seal the deal. When that barely registered as a blip, with people calling it “locker room talk,” I was pretty upset.

The following January — still nearly a year before the election of 2016 — he explained why he gets away with being awful. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. “It’s, like, incredible.”

But smack dab in the middle of those two incidents, he did something that I thought would stir universal disgust.

It did not. Obviously Trump won that election, and the various indignities he’s suffered upon the marginalized since then have made no difference in the hearts and minds of his voters, either.

He really could shoot someone and they wouldn’t care.

Now, apparently, Elon has correctly interpreted the license Trump’s fame bought him to be a cruel jerk in public as applying to him as well. I keep telling you guys to actually read Musk’s social media timeline, because he is a scoundrel so much more than what shows up in the news.

So today’s news: Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette works at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), which is a completely non-partisan watchdog organization dedicated to reducing and eliminating bureaucratic waste. He’s also blind. He testified on Capitol Hill last week, and in doing so, happened to criticize DOGE, the fictional “Department” that Trump created for Elon Musk to lead after Musk bought him the presidency.

The purpose of DOGE has turned out to be pretty transparent: To get rid of government spending that Republicans don’t like, and to clear out any and all obstacles — AKA overseers, regulators, or rules — that would prevent billionaires like Elon Musk from making as much money as humanly possible.

When Musk heard about Hedtler-Gaudette’s testimony, he was livid. He unleashed not just his own attack, but spurred on his online supporters to create their own as well, including a call for hackers to expose Hedtler-Gaudette’s banking information.

The Washington Post summed it up pretty well.

First, Musk retweeted a post on X noting that the “blind director of watchdog group funded by George Soros testifies that he does not see widespread evidence of government waste” and added two laughing/crying emojis. The tweet garnered more than 21 million views, and sparked dozens of hateful messages to Hedtler-Gaudette’s account.

“He couldn’t see sh*t … perfect excuse for being unable to perform your job,” one poster said. “The dei blind guy can’t see fraud. U can’t make up this garbage,” another wrote. One person even called for posters to surface Hedtler-Gaudette’s bank account.

The episode illustrates how Musk’s unparalleled online reach has given him a powerful tool to attack individuals who criticize DOGE, with one post able to spark hundreds of blistering responses from his followers.

You’ll note the immediate right-wing dogwhistle callout of George Soros. It’s true — Soros’ Open Society Foundation actually does fund POGO. What could Elon Musk possibly have against an organization whose mission statement contains the notion that “societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights”?

Musk is a product of the privilege of apartheid-era WHITE South Africa. The Open Society Foundations website spells it out pretty clearly: “George Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to Black South Africans under apartheid.”

In his interview with the Post, Hedtler-Gaudette shared his opinion of Musk after the incident. “He’s a fundamentally small person,” he told the paper.

That’s true of both Musk and Trump. Anything they see as weakness is an excuse to attack, including physical disabilities.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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