Trump Looks Weak Playing Second Fiddle to Musk

Elon Musk

For a guy who claims that he won a mandate to lead the nation, Donald Trump is looking pretty weak these days. He needs a PR makeover.

The Trump Transition is Elon Musk’s show. He is the guy who fired off 100 posts on his X platform on Dec. 18 to torpedo the bipartisan spending bill. JD Vance then seconded the motion, and Trump weighed in with the out-of-the-blue demand to eliminate the debt ceiling. Weaselly Speaker of the House Mike Johnson caved.

Musk crashed Trump’s much-feted Mar-a-Lago dinner to mend ties with Amazon founder, Washington Post owner, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos. 

His Space X rocket company, which has received more than $20B in federal launch contracts, is a competitor to Blue Origin. Elon and Jeff had things to talk about.

What next for Trump? Does he play a couple rounds of cribbage with self-exiled president Uncle Joe Biden, and let Elon to continue calling the shots?

More importantly, what’s in it for Elon, the pride of South Africa? Does he plan to use Trump as a vehicle to overhaul the Constitutional requirement that a US president must be born here? 

Trump could use his own victimization phrase, and maintain that the Constitution is being “very unfair” to the world’s richest man. That will get him a front row seat at Musk’s Inauguration.

Fifty-four journalists were killed in 2024 doing their jobs or in connection with their work, according to Reporters Without Borders. 

Palestine is the world’s No. 1 killing field, as 16 journalists perished in Gaza and the West Bank at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces. RWB crowns the IDF “the main predators in press freedom in 2024.” 

Pakistan (seven murdered journos), Bangladesh (five), Mexico (five) and Sudan (four) round out the Top 5 most dangerous assignments for journalists.

RWB counts 550 jailed journalists this year. China ranks as the top gulag with 124 reporters behind bars. Eleven of them are jailed in Hong Kong, which was had a free and open press before the Chinese government applied the screws.

Myanmar (61), Israel (41), Belarus (40) and Mexico (5) trail China.

Thibault Bruttin, RWB director general, says it’s vital not to use passive tenses when describing the toll that journalists pay for doing their jobs.

“Journalists do not die, they are killed; they are not in prison, regimes lock them up; they do not disappear, they are kidnapped,” said Bruttin.

Recalibrating ESG in 2025. More than nine in ten (91 percent) of CEOs plan to recalibrate their ESG initiatives in the coming year, according to Teneo’s CEO and Investor Outlook Survey. That’s up from 72 percent in 2024.

About a quarter (23 percent) are ramping down their ESG efforts, compared to eight percent in the year-ago poll.

Forty percent have become more cautious about what ESG efforts to engage in vs. 28 percent last year. 

And the kicker for PR firms: more than a third (35 percent) of CEOs say they will continue to do what’s right but are discussing it less outside their businesses. 

A glimmer of PR hope: forty-five percent of CEOs in the last survey said they were going to keep mum about ESG programming.

Happy New Year!