Trump and Musk’s ‘hard power’ is changing America before our eyes

When I was a teenager, my older brother took me to see Shane.

I wasn’t that into Westerns, and the movie just seemed to be about a little boy running after Alan Ladd in the wilderness of the Teton mountains, screaming, “Sha-a-a-a-ne, come back!”

I came across the movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night and this time, I understood why the George Stevens film is considered one of the best of all time. (The American Film Institute ranks “Shane, come back!” as one of the 50 top movie lines of all time.)

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk defended his work as President Donald Trump’s chief savings finder.Credit: Bloomberg

The parable on good and bad involves a fight between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. Ladd’s Shane is on the side of the honest homesteaders – including an alluring married woman, played by Jean Arthur. Arriving in creamy fringed buckskin, he is an enigmatic golden gunslinger who goes to work as a farmhand. Jack Palance plays the malevolent hired gun imported by the brutal cattle ranchers to drive out the homesteaders. Palance is dressed in a black hat and black vest. In case you don’t get the idea, a dog skulks away as Palance enters a saloon.

It’s so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the right thing to do versus the wrong. Law and order wasn’t a cliche or a passé principle that could be kicked aside if it interfered with baser ambitions.

The 1953 film is also a meditation on American masculinity in the wake of World War II. A real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.

I loved seeing all those sentimental, corny ideals that America was built on, even if those ideals have often been betrayed.

So it’s disorienting to have the men running America – Donald Trump and Elon Musk – relish bullying people who can’t fight back and blurring lines between good and bad.

They should be working for us, but we suspect they’re working for themselves.

After Musk met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, Trump admitted that he wasn’t sure if Musk was there as a representative of the US government or as an American CEO. “I don’t know,” Trump said. “They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India.”

Trump and Musk see government workers as losers for devoting themselves to public service rather than chasing dollars.

Axios called their aggressive approach “masculine maximalism”.

“Trump and Musk view masculinity quite similarly: tough-guy language, macho actions, irreverent, crude – and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.”

The two are freezing programs, firing federal workers en masse, ripping apart the government and decimating agencies with no precision, transparency or decency.

Republicans are cowering, and Democrats are frozen like the townsfolk in Westerns when the bad guys take over.

Trump’s glowering mugshot even hangs outside the Oval Office, like an Old West “Wanted: dead or alive” poster. And Musk, giving a news conference with his son X Æ A-Xii on his shoulders, mirrored Palance with his black outfit, including a dark MAGA hat.

It’s bizarre to have the White House accusing judges who pause Trump’s depredations for a constitutional review of provoking a constitutional crisis.

Trump and Musk are turning our values upside down. The president demands fealty, even if he is asking his followers and pawns to do something illicit or transgressive. Loyalty outweighs legality.

He immediately purged federal prosecutors who worked on January 6-related cases. He ordered a McCarthyesque probe of thousands of FBI agents who investigated a bloody sack of the US Capitol that endangered police officers and lawmakers. So, now the agents are the scofflaws (lawbreakers), and the scofflaw is the dispenser of “justice”?

Trump is even making it easier for US companies to bribe foreign governments – something that’s not exactly an American ideal.

Danielle Sassoon, the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office was prosecuting the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, resigned on Thursday before she could be fired, after Trump’s Justice Department ordered her to drop the case against the mayor. Trump seemed willing to let Adams, his latest sycophant, off the hook if he co-operated with the administration’s deportation efforts. On Thursday, Adams granted immigration officers access to the city’s jail.

Danielle Sassoon, the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned before she could be fired.Credit: Bloomberg

On Fox & Friends on Friday, Adams sat with Tom Homan, Trump’s monomaniacal border tsar, who didn’t mince words.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” Homan said. “And we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Sassoon is a conservative legal star with Harvard and Yale university degrees who clerked for Antonin Scalia and is a contributor to the Federalist Society – and is, by the way, going through all this mishegoss (craziness) with a baby due in mid-March.

She is the hero of the story, and Adams is the miscreant. But Trump and his former lawyer, now the acting No.2 at Justice, Emil Bove, are trying to brand her as incompetent and insubordinate, and Adams as politically persecuted (like Trump).

Six more Justice Department officials quit after Sassoon, including the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, a former Brett Kavanaugh clerk named Hagan Scotten.

Scotten wrote to Bove: “If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the new secretary of health and human services – as hard as that is to believe – is hailed by Trump as a health saviour when Kennedy is a dire threat to America’s children with his dismissal of vaccines.

Most of the world sees Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero and Russian President Vladimir Putin as a villain. I feel queasy when I hear Trump talking dotingly about Putin, a KGB-trained thug. I’m sure that dogs skulk away from Putin as he walks by.

But Putin has made it his business to seduce the president, so the easily flattered Trump sees Zelensky as the inevitable loser in his bid to keep Ukraine intact. As Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth put it, Zelensky needs to get with it and understand “hard-power realities”, like the reality that he’s not getting all of his territory back.

On Ukraine joining NATO, Trump sounds like a Putin spokesperson, asserting that “Russia would never accept” that.

In a speech in Brussels on Thursday, Hegseth said: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can’t shoot values. You can’t shoot flags. And you can’t shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power.”

If we lose our values and abandon what those before us have fought for, are we the same America? Our heroes preserved the Union and liberated Europe from the Nazis. We’re supposed to be the shining city on the hill. It feels as if we’re turning our country into a crass, commercial product, making it cruel as we maximise profits.

I hope, as Trump and Musk exercise their “masculine maximalism”, they remember the words of John Wayne in the 1972 Western, The Cowboys: “A big mouth don’t make a big man.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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