In the three months and five thousand years since Election Day, I’ve been playing a lot of online chess. I didn’t play chess as a kid, and I’m not particularly excited about chess right now. It’s more that, given the circumstances, it’s nice to take part in a zero-sum game I can regularly win.
The only problem is that I’m not very good at chess so I mostly lose. Which is why, instead of telling you about a brilliant strategy that I frequently employ, I’l tell you about a simple tactic that strangers on the internet frequently employ against me.
It’s known as a “fork.” Here’s one example:
As you can see from my beautifully drawn arrows, the white bishop (which moves diagonally) is threatening two pieces - the knight and the rook - at once. Black can move the rook to safety, in which case White takes the knight. Or Black can move the knight to safety, in which case White takes the rook. White has two choices, both of them bad. That’s what makes it a fork.
So, while playing chess hasn’t made me better at chess, at least it’s given me a good way of describing something I think about a lot when it comes to politics and public life. Usually, your opponents aren’t totally incompetent - if there’s an easy way to parry a line of attack, that’s while they’ll do. At the same time, they’re not geniuses (or rather, life is hard and complicated), so they’re probably not thinking the proverbial twelve moves ahead. Your job, then, is to think exactly one move ahead, putting your opponent in a position where they’re left with only bad choices.
Fork.
Right now, whether you’re a Senator, an activist, a party official, the writer of a mid-sized newsletter, or a person with a phone and a social media account, you have one job. Turn Elon Musk from Trump’s win-win situation into his lose-lose one.
And do it by March 14th.
Rumors of the Musk-Trump Divorce Are Greatly Exaggerated
For months, conventional wisdom among some Trump observers has been that the Donald-Elon alliance is doomed. I think that’s wishful thinking. They need each other too much.
For all Trump’s talk of yuge mandates, he barely won a second term. His margin of victory in Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, was 1.7 percent. According to an exhaustive study of coin dips, there’s about a 51 percent chance that a coin which starts off heads-up will land heads-up, and vice versa with tails.
In other words, this was almost literally a coin-flip election - and it’s hard to imagine Trump would have won it without the world’s richest man. It’s not just Musk’s money, money, his reputation among business, or his gazillionaire-genius personal brand. Musk had credibility with a key bloc of voters — young men — who might otherwise have stayed home. There’s a reason Joe Rogan’s election-eve interview was with Musk, not Trump. And there’s a reason that when Rogan endorsed Trump, he didn’t do so directly. Instead he said, essentially, “I’ll have what Elon’s having.”
If anything, Musk has been even more helpful for Trump since the election. Trump’s superpower is understanding how leverage works with people. Musk’s superpower, I think, is understanding how leverage works within organizations. I’m not a fan of DOGE turning the Treasury Department’s secure payments system into a teenage wasteland. But it’s a very clever way - if you don’t care ab
out things like laws or ethics - to take control of the federal government. It’s out-of-the-box enough that Trump and Project 2025, despite having years of prep, didn’t think of it.
In a slightly different world, it’s easy to imagine a Trump/Musk match made in heaven. The president does popular stuff for the cameras – cracks down on illegal immigration, takes credit for any good economic news, does photo ops involving disaster relief or supporting the troops. Meanwhile, the world’s richest man acts as enforcer and executor, turning off federal payments, unleashing online hordes to attack critics, and spending gazillions of dollars on primaries to keep Republican lawmakers in line.
I’m not saying that kind of power couple would be unstoppable. But it would be very, very difficult to stop.
“Two Flowers, No Gardener”
Fortunately, Musk and Trump aren’t quite perfectly matched. Their relationship calls to mind what director Mike Nichols said, when asked to describe why Carrie Fisher’s marriage to Paul Simon didn’t last.
“Two flowers, no gardener.”
For all their complementary traits, Musk and Trump insist on being the main character - in fact, they seem unable to contemplate being anything else. Trump wants complete control over America, and he wants to play the president on TV. Musk wants to reshape the world in his image. These are overlapping goals - among other things, they both require shredding the Constitution. But they’re not really compatible.
They’re particularly incompatible because Musk has fallen victim to one of the most dangerous diseases of the 21st century - Sudden Onset Desire to Become an Influencer. It’s not enough for Musk to slash lifesaving aid for babies at risk of being born with HIV or leave half a billion dollars worth of food meant to go to starving families lying untouched in warehouses instead. He has to brag about it on the internet. He wants to be the biggest celebrity in the world. And it’s quite possible he’ll get his wish.
The problem is that “becoming globally famous for things you do in government” and “serving the president” are often at odds with each other. There’s a lot of talk about the conflicts of interests between Musk’s business life and his DOGE one. But there is, ironically, another conflict of interest Musk is failing to self-police - what he wants and what Trump wants aren’t always the same thing.
A Good Rule of Thumb for Politics: Don’t Freak Everyone Out
During the campaign, Musk bragged that he’d figured out electric cars and rockets, and then suggested that maybe he could figure out politics, too. To the extent that the secret to winning elections is “Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up your candidate during a year that’s brutal for incumbent parties everywhere and at a moment when the other side’s candidate had to drop out just a few months before Election Day,” he succeeded.
But politics doesn’t end when you win an election. Everything Musk has done since Inauguration Day suggests that he doesn’t have it all figured out. Back when most Americans thought of him as just a wealthy donor, Musk had a pretty decent approval rating. Today, even as Democrats wait anxiously for buyer’s remorse to set in among Trump voters, Musk’s approval has plummeted. Democrats deeply dislike him, obviously. More surprising is that, according to a CBS poll, only 30 percent of Republicans want Musk should have “a lot of” influence over the government. You can argue about whether Musk’s influence is currently good or bad. But it’s unquestionably a lot.
This means that, at a moment when Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on “does the president have to follow laws or nah?”, there’s actually a huge area of agreement that crosses party lines. Most of Washington would like Elon to chill out. So would the business community - they’re fine with deregulation, and they may not be about to man the barricades of an anti-Trump resistance. But Musk’s behavior threatens economic stability in a way that even Trump, for now, does not.
Then there are Republicans in Congress. For them, Musk is a huge headache. He riles up their constituents, divides their base, and spends much more of his time threatening them than helping them. They already live in fear of one guy destroying their careers with a single angry tweet. Adding a second one to the mix is too much. Plus, there’s an opportunity. If you’re a GOP lawmaker in a competitive district, pushing back in small ways against Musk is a way to burnish your credentials as a moderate without having to directly oppose Trump.
Musk has made some smart power moves - especially getting close to Trump’s right-hand man Stephen Miller and making Miller’s wife the official spokesperson for DOGE. For those reasons, plus his giant piles of money, you’re not going to see Susie Wiles or the Chamber of Commerce come out publicly against Musk. But it’s notable that the Murdoch empire (Fox News, the New York Post) isn’t rushing to his defense. And behind the scenes, I suspect everyone is saying the same thing, albeit with different motives: the sooner Elon Musk stops co-running the government, the better.
The Ides-Minus-One of March
In a normal world, public opinion against Musk taking a big public role would lead to him retreating from the public eye. He’d either leave government or become more of a behind the scenes operative. That’s not Musk’s style. Instead, he’s likely to realize that the only way he can win (or even co-win) the Game of Thrones is to go as close to full dictator as possible, as quickly as possible.
That’s what makes this particular moment extra dangerous. Musk is at the forefront of all the things that, even by Trump standards, have usually been beyond the pale. Excusing political violence. Pushing the administration to ignore court orders. Ignoring even the most basic anti-corruption rules. Then there’s the whole Nazi-salute-let’s-not-make-a-big-deal-about-the-Holocaust thing. Musk’s view seems to be that he’s come up with a brilliant hack to make governing easier, and it’s called despotism.
That’s one reason to get Musk out of his current position as co-president as soon as possible. The other reason is the negotiations over government funding, which will run out on March 14.
It seems likely that Republicans, despite being in charge of the country, don’t have their act together enough to fund the government on their own. They’ll need at least a few Democratic votes. Which means they’ll (probably) need to throw Democrats some bones. And we should want those bones to involve greater oversight of Elon Musk and DOGE.
For example, Dems could demand that special government employees like Musk release their financial disclosure forms to the public. Or define “government work” to include communicating in public about government work (special employees can’t work more than 130 days for the government per year). Or prohibit special government employees from receiving government contracts while on the job. Or make it clear that tampering with the Treasury Department’s payment system or Americans’ personal data is illegal.
Behind the scenes, I suspect there will be a lot of support for these kinds of demands, and not just from Democrats. Republicans, business leaders, and Trump lackeys who have hit their limit on Faustian bargains will likely be happy to see Musk diminished.
A Fork in the Road
So what we you do? Everything possible, in whatever way possible, to make Elon Musk’s already toxic brand even more toxic, especially before March 14. If you’re a lawmaker or other public figure with a megaphone, that means staying on topic - if you have to choose between talking about Elon Musk or Donald Trump, for the next month you should choose Musk.
But if you’re a regular person, you still have agency here. First, if you have a social media account of any kind, (occasionally) share news and information about the risks Musk’s takeover of the government poses. (In my opinion, the coup-and-constitutional-crisis stuff is the least persuasive, whether or not it’s true. The stuff that resonates with everyone is that a) this guy has access to your social security number and bank account and b) he’s going to use his control over the government to benefit his businesses.) If you don’t have a social media account, use the original social media, i.e. talking with other human beings.
Second, call your member of Congress. Not just the Republicans. Democrats in safe districts are trying to carve out space as anti-Trump leaders this time round - if you call your congressperson to say thanks for standing up to Musk, it sends a signal that that’s what they should focus on going forward.
Will all this be enough to get Musk out of our government, or at least relegate him to a more conventional rich-guy-with-opinions role? No one knows. But that’s where the fork comes in. By the middle of next month, we need Trump and his allies to face an uncomfortable choice. Protect Musk and see their approval ratings suffer? Or protect their approval ratings and distance themselves from Elon Musk?
As hundreds of strangers who have beaten me in chess will tell you, if we can force that kind of choice, we’ll win.
Fork Musk. Fork Trump. Fork ‘em all.
Many of us have sent multiple messages to our senators, which, in the case of my state are: one R and one D. So far, they have both voted for all, and most of Trump's nominees respectively. Oh, and they sent me form letters acknowledging my contact, full of BS without apology. I post, too, although I am merely a somewhat reclusive private citizen, for the most part. You are right that we need to try. I have been focusing on Musk not because I'm a chess master, but because he has more power in many ways than Trump and is a more over fascist. But I think the job of creating a fork in the road might require other actions, such as work stoppages, withholding of taxes, a bit of nonviolent gathering in protest Tell me I'm wrong.