Apparently Elon has a punchable face

His five-year-old didn't hesitate when he had the chance . . .

Elon Musk sports a bruise over his right eye.

by Brian Karem

The big news out of the Donald Trump/Elon Musk “Press Conference” in the Oval Office on Friday had to do with Musk’s five-year-old son.

Musk showed up with a black eye and explained he had encouraged his son to take a swing at him. I won’t venture to guess why. But, according to a few D.C. wags, Musk’s son did what millions, if not billions of people on the planet would like to do – he punched his dad in the face.

During most of his appearance with Trump in the Oval Office, Musk stood silently sporting a black cap, t-shirt and jacket. He looked like a second base Little League umpire who had a tough call to make. Trump who sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, presented him with a gold key and thanked him for his service to government.

It seemed like the press forgot about the part where Musk insulted Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” saying he was “disappointed” because it would increase deficits. A member of the press could’ve asked about this, an important story. But, you would’ve had to locate a real journalist there to do it.

The president referred to the public appearance as a “Press Conference”. But it wasn’t. It was a press pool availability event featuring around two dozen reporters and technicians, handpicked by the administration to attend the gathering in the Oval Office. The open Press corps rarely has access to Trump, and to be a press conference you have to have people asking you far more important questions than what kind of marital advice would you give the President of France?

At one point I thought Trump and Musk were taking subtle swipes at each other. Trump highlighted the fact that Musk is an immigrant and Musk said the Oval Office “finally has the majesty it deserves thanks to the President.” No. I’m sure he meant that as a compliment. After all, Trump would love to be called “Your Majesty.”

They talked reverentially about the Oval Office and how honored Musk was to give his labor in a job that was “only supposed to last 134 days.” I had him at 100 -105 days in the pool. My friend Mark had him at 130-135, so he’s going to get a big bottle of coca cola to celebrate – along with a bag of Starburst and Tootsie rolls.

Musk bragged about how DOGE is on track to save “$200 billion” which is far less than the trillions of dollars in waste he claimed he would find. The sad part of this is that after spending 134 days at the White House, Musk, the richest man on earth, can only successfully claim that he’s managed to take a baseball bat to government, displace workers and potentially make government databases more vulnerable to attack.

The amount of money he saved the government? Who knows if it is true (there are numerous analyses already showing it’s going to COST us more than it saves)? But, if it is, to put it in perspective, Musk could donate $200 billion of his own wealth to the government and he’d still be the richest man on earth with $28 billion more in wealth than Mark Zuckerberg, the second richest person in the world.

Hell, Musk, “who gave so much to the government,” along with Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the third richest person on the planet, could jointly donate more than $500 billion to the causes of hunger, education and healthcare in the United States and still have close to $500 billion among the three of them.

Both Trump and Musk fumbled through about a half hour of questions and answers. Trump in answering a question from Fox reporter Peter Doocy said he’d never use the autopen like former President Joe Biden did. He also said he would rely on “Your newspapers” to inform him if someone had issued an executive order without his knowledge. “I would be able to see it because the next day or sooner I’d be reading about something I knew nothing about,” he said acknowledging the value of the press he often denigrates. I wonder if he would call it “Fake News” then?

After Trump spoke, Musk preached a little about the “banal evil of bureaucracy,” and somehow managed to evoke visions of the Trump administration and Musk’s own business practices as he said bureaucracies were “largely of an uncaring nature,” and that money “is worst spent when it isn’t your money and it’s spent on people you don’t know.”

Doocy got a laugh when he asked Trump if he had any marital advice for the President of France, following an incident with his wife that was caught on tape this week. Then Doocy followed it up with a question about a Democratic plan to avoid losing “every battleground state” by commissioning a $20 million study to see how to talk to the American people.

I had no idea the President was a member of the Democratic party and could speak to the nuance of that party’s strategy, but apparently I alone missed that entry in Trump’s expansive resume.

Trump spoke about money. “You shouldn’t have to hire consultants to see what Americans need,” he said. “I could tell you what they did wrong.”

Then without prompting, he continued. “We won the popular vote. We won everything. . .They spend money to find out what they did wrong. I can tell you what they did wrong. I can tell you every one of their programs. Men playing in women’s sports, I would say that’s not a winner. When they say ‘Transgender for Everybody,’ I think that’s not isn’t a winner. When they say ‘Open Borders so the entire world’s populations of criminals can pour into our borders’, that’s not a winner. . . I gave them that for free, but I don’t see them changing,” the President said.

Let’s dissect that shall we? Trump is right when he says you shouldn’t need a consultant to tell you what people need, nor is he in error when he says that people don’t like the things he describes. That covers most Democrats, Republicans and all the druids.

The problem is that it isn’t an accurate representation of his opposing party’s policy stance. They are Trump’s shorthand interpretation of those policies he uses to trigger his supporters, and the Democrats are absolutely horrible about cleaning up Trump’s lies. The Democrats think that in their “knowledge and wisdom” they can talk factually to someone who’s been conned emotionally to change their mind logically.

Asked about the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial and possibly pardoning him, Trump said Diddy “used to like me a lot” before veering off into stating that being the President of the United States is not a popularity contest. He also didn’t know he had taken an oath to defend the United States Constitution, so give him a break. After all, he said he might give Diddy one.

Trump then used a question about tariffs to defend the destruction of both Habeas Corpus and Congress. He said we wouldn’t have a country left “if we waited on Congress” to do its job and then said he must be “fast and nimble.” Those are two words no one, not even his greatest fans have ever used to describe Donald Trump.

He praised Elon Musk building “tunnels underground” as opposed to above ground I suppose before he was thankfully cut short with a question about his “One Big Beautiful Bill.” He careened off topic into gibberish about numbers and terms we’ve heard in every stump speech. “A number nobody has heard of before,” and “The largest we’ve ever had. No one has ever seen anything like this,” before stumbling into other “amazing things,” and ending with giving himself credit for all the great things on the planet while the rest is Joe Biden’s fault.

Of course he insulted Harvard before saying he wants people to go to trade schools “to fix motors and engines where people learn how to build rocket ships,” while Musk nodded in the affirmative. I guess without the higher education, all of those motors and engines and rockets will be designed somewhere else.

Maybe he wants to make sure we all go to trade schools because he figures we can’t handle college.

And then Doocy, kicking into gear, asked Trump whether in retrospect he wouldn’t rather be a judge since everything he does ends in court? The way Doocy framed it, he didn’t ask if Trump had done anything wrong to prompt the action, but gave Trump the impression he was being asked whether he thought the courts had a right to defy him. Trump proceeded to preach in defense of the very separation of powers in the constitution he’s trying to nullify – while blaming the Judiciary for doing it’s job. The fact is, there would be fewer judgments needed if the administration were more competent. It isn’t a judge’s fault that Trump continues to defy the law. That’s on Trump.

Trump stayed on the attack disparaging the “Liberal Bent” or “Radical left” agenda. He claimed the worst thing to ever happen to the country was allowing 21 million murderers, criminals and mental patients from foreign countries to roam freely through the United States and then said we would “lose our country very quickly,” if he couldn’t get rid of the “stone cold criminals” Biden had somehow allowed into the country. It isn’t true, but Trump has been saying it so long he firmly believes it – or firmly believes it when he says it.

His lies are often pathetic. He claims that in four months he solved the energy problem and we “are now seeing $1.99 gasoline,” he claimed. Well the average price of gas is actually $3.16 a gallon. The cheapest is in Mississippi where you can find gas at $2.66 a gallon. Nowhere near what Trump claimed. Maybe he’s buying gasoline in Fantasyland.

If this was a press conference and not a propaganda broadcast, someone would have pushed back. No one did. No one challenged Trump on any of his lies though I know that many of the reporters in that room know what Trump says is a blatant lie.

Trump insulted former President Joe Biden, calling him a “vicious person.” Trump claimed Biden, “hurt a lot of people, so I don’t feel sorry for him,” before also saying Biden is “not a smart person.”

Musk then jumped in and offered his keen insight on the issues, with hands spread wide, fingertips touching as he adopted the attitude of a self-reverential professor/guru talking to an assembly of kindergartners. “The fundamental flaw of the left is empathy for the criminals not empathy for the victims.” And then Musk began his Ted Talk, and claimed that judges who do not bow to Trump are “violating” the constitution.

He had clearly outstayed his welcome, but Musk can never read a room. Doocy, who had already had enough of Musk from an earlier encounter, just stared at him with a look that some said made them wonder if Doocy thought Musk’s son had the right idea.

Trump continued to veer off course, talking more about drug dealers and killers, saying “we can’t keep them here for years before they go to trial,” and “we have to get them out rapidly.”

Not one person asked the natural follow up question about the destruction of habeas corpus and Trump offered no explanation. No one asked him where he got his numbers. He didn’t say.

He closed his remarks about the automotive industry; “Build a car, make it in America.”

So, what did America learn from the public appearance of Trump and Musk Friday? Trump has marital advice for Emmanuel Macron. He knows how to fix the Democratic party. He hasn’t ruled out a pardon for Diddy. He’s great. Biden sucks. Elon Musk is gone, but will still be around. Musk is no Constitutional scholar, though he didn’t mind playing one on television.

Oh and Musk’s five-year-old son apparently has a pretty good jab.

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Brian Karem is an award-winning reporter, columnist, and author of "Free the Press," and seven others books. He has a popular podcast and Substack, "Just Ask The Question,” as well as a related Substack "Reporter’s Notebook.” You SHOULD subscribe to BOTH

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