Trump's men: What makes them tick?
Trump's men: What makes them tick?
Two books show the point at which Elon Musk and RFK Jr intersect
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story. We’re coming to you a couple days late because of a consequential election.
Please consider supporting this news literacy effort by investing in a paid membership so that we can keep it freely accessible to our community of more than 10,000 subscribers in 114 countries.
If, for whatever reason, it’s not possible for you to upgrade to paid, email thisweekthosebooks@substack.com and we’ll give you full access, no questions asked.
🎧 Would you rather listen? The podcast drops tomorrow.
– Rashmee
The Big Story:
Donald Trump will be the big boss but who will serve as lieutenants as he works to Make America Great Again?
Two top contenders for influential roles in Trump’s administration are:
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, the world’s richest man
Environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr
What both these men read or write, as well as what is written about them, offers clues to how they might act as key members of the new US administration.
This Week, Those Books:
As our book picks show, these two men had dramatically different upbringings – Musk with a troubled childhood, Kennedy an idyllic one – but both are imbued by the spirit of their grandfathers.
The Backstory:
Elon Musk
The founder of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter), was probably Trump’s most consequential backer in the 2024 election. He put more than $175 million into a get-out-the-vote operation, ran a novel if controversial million-dollar-a-day reward scheme for registered voters and turned his social media platform into a giant megaphone for the Trump campaign.
Before the election, Trump said Musk would lead a government efficiency commission. Musk explained it would examine how departments spend in order to eliminate "unsensible" activities.
While everyone everywhere would agree that government could always use less red tape and more innovation, it’s not clear what Musk-driven "efficiencies" might mean, other than the firing of tens of thousands of non-partisan, permanent civil servants.
Robert F Kennedy Jr
Scion of the Kennedy political dynasty, the longtime environmental lawyer and supporter of good causes has become known for his vocal vaccine scepticism. In August, he abandoned his own presidential campaign to back Trump and could now be given the role of Trump’s “health czar”.
Trump has said he will allow Kennedy to “go wild1 on health (care). I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines”.
Kennedy has suggested that common immunisations, as well as fluoridated water, could be under scrutiny, along with the Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare — which provides health insurance to 45 million Americans. He has issued a warning to the FDA, the federal agency responsible for public health.2
This Week’s Books:
Elon Musk
By: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2023
This immensely readable account comes from the man who’s written a number of bestselling biographies, not least of Steve Jobs. Drawing on two years of close access, Walter Isaacson sketches a delicate portrait of the tech entrepreneur who went from a tumultuous upbringing to unimaginable riches and reach. Musk was named for his maternal grandfather Joshua Elon Haldeman, a rule-breaker who left Canada for apartheid South Africa because he felt government was usurping control of the individual’s life. Elon was just three when his grandfather died but he seems to have imbibed the Haldeman family’s motto “Live dangerously – carefully”. Musk is described by one associate as a person “who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming”. The entrepreneur himself confesses that his youthful years marked him for life: “Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high”.
Choice quotes:
“…violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. ‘Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.’ He [Errol Musk] proudly concedes that he exercised ‘an extremely stern streetwise autocracy’ with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, ‘Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others’.”
“’With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways’, says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. ‘If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with’. This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. ‘He learned to shut down fear’, she says. ‘If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy’.”
“‘I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers’, says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. ‘I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain’.”
“…he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad”.
– Talulah Riley, Musk’s second wife
American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family
By: Robert F Kennedy Jr
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2018
It’s hard to see Robert F Kennedy Jr, alleged nutball, in this charming, rather conventional story that weaves his family’s story with that of America. Grandfather Joe was the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Uncle Jack became President JFK; his father Robert was killed while running for president. Like Elon Musk, Kennedy appears to have internalised his grandfather’s passions, in this case, for public service and principled support for community and ethical issues. Kennedy’s recent teaming up with Trump, who’s openly admiring of authoritarian leaders, is hard to reconcile with the hard words he writes about an earlier fraught period of history: “While most Americans have forgotten fascism’s dangerous appeal in 1930s America, the era remains an important object lesson today, as private financial powers once again reassert dominion over American democracy”.
Choice quotes:
“Grandpa understood what the founders [of America] had also known – that we must make a fundamental choice between democracy and imperialism”.
“In 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace predicted in the New York Times the dangerous rise of American fascism, which he warned would be coterminous with the ascendance of right-wing media. ‘With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power’, Wallace warned. ‘American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery’.”
“As late as 1961 he [grandfather] scolded Jack and his youngest daughter, Jean, for being late for lunch. ‘Get your tails up to the table right now, you’re ten minutes late’. As they jogged up the beach toward the big house, Jack turned to Jean and said, ‘Do you think he knows I’m president of the United States?’”
I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful, and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.
Email thisweekthosebooks@substack.com to tell us what you think.
Connect with me on LinkedIn | Twitter | Bluesky | Facebook | Threads | YouTube
Could RFK Jr. go ‘wild’ on health and medicine? asks the D.C. Diagnosis newsletter from STAT, which is produced by Boston Globe Media
RFK Jr wrote on X: “FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags”.