Laugh and the World Laughs with You

So, this week’s Big News is that Donald and Elon have fallen out.  I am shocked to the very core.  Two overgrown schoolboys with no social filters and egos the size of which are dwarfed only by that of their wallets, descend into name-calling and bitch-slapping anarchy with Trump threatening to use the might of his great country’s financial muscle as his own personal nipple twist.  The thought that anyone could have viewed this state of affairs as anything other than inevitable beggars belief:
“I’m not going to drive your car any more.”
“Well in that case, you can’t use my rocket.”
“Call that a rocket?”
I can see the clickbait now: “This is what happens when two super-powerful weirdos collide.”

We have (in his own estimation) the most powerful man on Earth versus the richest man in the world.  If the man with the biggest Pokeman Card collection joins the fray, God alone knows what might happen.  These are two people who are more divorced from reality than they will ever be from one another.  One of them believing they already rule the world, the other that they will one day rule Mars.  They are Beano characters: Donald the Trumper (in his red and black striped jumper and baseball cap) and Lonely Elon (round glasses, lots of simpering and a spookily similar Donald-esque baseball cap) destined to peck away at each other for all of time.

On such people our futures depend…

On the World Stage DT threatens that, should Putin not play ball with his ‘peace plan’, he will simply ‘walk away’, leaving the world’s favourite oligarch gangster to do exactly what he pleases.  Erm… I think I may have spotted a slight flaw in the plan there Mr President.  According to the news he may also decide to put Elon in his place by selling the Tesla car he bought at the height of their bromance, oh, days ago now.  Well, that will settle his hash won’t it?  He sold you a car and made lots of money from the deal, you sell it and you lose thousands whilst he loses nothing.  Trumpenomics in action.  Perhaps it’s the principle… ah, I’ve just spotted the flaw in that argument as well.  Almost as alarming as the childishness of it all is the sheer spitefulness.  Mr Trump, for instance, has just said that Elon is ‘Crazy’.  That is like being reprimanded for having a bad diet by Hannibal Lecter.  It can only be a matter of time before one of them accuses the other of ‘smelling of poo’.

The transition from being given the ‘Golden Key to the Whitehouse’ to finding that all of the locks have been changed has happened at a breakneck speed.  Donald does not care for disagreement.  At least, he does not care for anyone disagreeing with him – and even less for anyone who dares to criticise.  The shameless Oval Office ambushes of Presidents Zelenski and Ramaphosa are clear indication that he sees other leaders as lesser beings and his profligate use of ‘facts’ (lies) that take seconds to fact-check and disprove demonstrates that he has a similar respect for the truth.  Here is a man that believes that things are true simply because he has said them.

Elon, meanwhile, has become the richest man on Earth, despite the fact that he is clearly from another planet entirely.  This is a man who appears to take his caffeine intravenously.  He teeters so close to the edge of sanity that it is inevitable he will fall off sometimes.  It must be nice to know that his friends will be there to catch him…

I am an old man now, I was a young one once and before that I was a child (it’s just the way that things go).  I very clearly remember falling out with friends in my formative years, bouts of name-calling and emotions that I could not control.  I grew up.  Hopefully those at the helm of the planet’s most powerful nation might do something similar before it’s too late.

Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you.  Act like a prat and it laughs at you… and you can’t put a tariff on that.

I am very happy to apologise in advance to anyone this piece might upset, but this relationship is so odd and the behaviour, from a world leader, so bizarre, I think it is hard to defend. The obvious caveat is that at least one of them is a politician, and we all know what they are like…