Elon Musk VS Donald Trump: WHO'S PUTTING OUR LIVES MORE AT RISK?

Trick question. It’s both. Both possess the intellectual capacity of a fire escape and the empathy of a dung beetle, and they’re running things.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the second plane crash—in Philadelphia, Friday night—that occurred within 48 hours of the first plane crash. This time, six passengers on a medical jet and one person on the ground tragically lost their lives.

Like everything that seems to be unraveling in America these days, you can trace it right back to the decades-long assault on government by an authoritarian Far Right. You know, the loony-tunes traveling circus now fully in control of Trump’s Republican Party?

The same people who tell you they’re all “law and order,” but ensure even when their cult isn’t vomiting up violence on our Capitol—to be pardoned so they can do it again—there’s no one to enforce safety laws, investigate failures or even staff the damn air traffic control towers.

Maybe having one guy doing two air-traffic jobs Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., a week after you fired the head of the Transportation Safety Authority, head of the Coast Guard and disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee the day you took office was a galactically-asinine idea? Maybe letting an unelected billionaire with a penchant for Nazi salutes and common sense of a public urinal push the head of the FAA to resign that same day also isn’t so wise?

Yep, this was the handiwork of the the always measured and thoughtful Deleterious Duo—who are planning to take a sledgehammer to any still-functioning sectors of the U.S. government with their Project 2025 plan to fire two million federal workers and replace 50,000 career civil servants with inbred, loyalty-pledging goons. Because nothing says “drain the swamp” like turning the entire government into a MAGA-branded Ponzi scheme.

How We Got Here: A Right-Wing Passion Project Decades in the Making

Trump didn’t start this war on government. He’s just the dumbest and most reckless executor of it.

For more than a century, America has been building a regulatory system to, you know, keep us from dying unnecessarily. Teddy Roosevelt gave us the FDA because he thought people might not enjoy eating poisoned meat (in his defense, he never met RFK Jr.).

Woodrow Wilson, despite his incurable racism, helped pass laws that prevented banks from treating the economy like a Vegas casino. And FDR—God bless that cigarette-wielding, Nazi-beating, polio-fighting SOB—gave us Social Security, banking protections, and the notion that maybe starving seniors and mass homelessness weren’t actually great for a modern economy, and country.

That’s how it was for a solid 50 years afterwards, when a Republican (a great one), Dwight D. Eisenhower, created the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958. Hell, Richard Nixon created the EPA! (solid multi-tasking with all the criming).

But Reagan—the GOP’s patron saint of deregulation—took a wrecking ball to it all. He called government “the problem” (while running for, and expanding, the most powerful government job) and slashed protections that kept consumers, workers and those just taking a stroll down the street, safer, while keeping a leash on corporations. Reagan’s deregulation ushered in a golden (gilded?) age of unchecked greed, corporate cock-up and industries writing their own rules—from Big Pharma to Big Oil to, yes, aviation safety.

Fast forward through decades of Republican attacks on oversight, and you get…this. Planes crashing. Infrastructure crumbling. More train derailments than in a 1920s silent film montage.

Trump & Musk Want to Finish the Job—And It Will Kill More of us

Trump, a man who thinks “airports” existed during the Revolutionary War (actual thing the dunderhead said) and Elon Musk, a man who thinks babies born via C-section have larger brains (actual thing this numb nuts said) are now the lead architects of Project 2025, the GOP’s blueprint for turning the federal government into a dictatorship run by billionaires, corporate monopolies, racist tools, religious extremists and professional arse-smoochers.

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The plane crashes we just witnessed are what happens when you defund, dismantle, and discredit the very institutions meant to protect us. Air travel is one of the most regulated industries in the world, and for good reason—because physics couldn’t give two craps about your tax cuts or tantrums or conspiracies that “they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Physics, to paraphrase Monty Python And The Holy Grail, “farts in your general direction.”

Planes need to be inspected. Air traffic controllers need to be properly trained and not forced to work double shifts because they’re understaffed. These are actual life-and-death decisions, not some fantasy about how swell it is to let the free market figure it out. That worked out great for libertarian paradise Somalia.

And it’s not just aviation. This is happening across every major public service. The FDA, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Consumer Product Safety Commission—all of them are underfunded, understaffed and increasingly run by people who see regulation in the abstract, something bad or expensive or just ideologically wrong.

As opposed to something that Saved Lives. That actually made America great, turned us into a modern, first world country, an economic powerhouse, trusted trading partner and tourist attraction. So you see, they’re not just trying to get rid of regulations to make Elon Musk-ier or please their walking-dead zealots who flitter around growling about “deregulation.”

They’re actively trying to take us back a century, make us a country-backwater that matches their fake rural accents and flannel gear. And let’s say it plainly: They’re trying to kill us, with deregulation. Because if that’s what it takes to enrich the monopoly state, to bring a creepy, Mike-Johnson smile to the faces of their little brothel of billionaires, then it’s on the agenda.

Trump is proposing we get rid of the FDIC, because who wants their funds federally insured when you can put them into Trump’s latest crypto scam? Musk has gained control over the Treasury department payment systems and data (causing a senior official there to resign in protest)—even though nobody elected him and he doesn’t work for a real government agency!

Do you have direct deposit for a government or Social Security check? You do, well, then Elon Has Your Banking Information.

You know what else? There’s literally nothing more inevitable than more Americans dying from reckless, wanton deregulation of industries and activities perfectly safe when regulated, but quite the opposite when not. Like flying.

Because who wouldn’t want airline safety regulations set by the same folks who brought you Spirit Airlines and lead-infused baby formula?

This will be the fight of our lives, folks. Because if Trump, Elon and their Mad Ass-Hatters get their way, those plane crashes? They won’t be an anomaly. But the ghosts of a much more tragic and carnage-filled Christmas future.

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