I thought I’d take a brief moment to whet your expectations about the story of Mr. George Santos, soon to be Representative George Santos (R-NY), possibly soon to be former Representative George Santos (R-NY). This is mainly just elaborating on points made in the Times piece from yesterday with a few tidbits from my digging last year.

Let’s consider the timeline.

Santos’ biography turns on a purported family real-estate business which owns 13 properties. He made news during the pandemic grousing about how his tenants were taking advantage of eviction holidays. That family real-estate firm appears to the Devolder Organization LLC, maybe, which we’ll come back to in a moment.

This morning The New York Times published an exposé on incoming New York Representative George Santos (R) who will soon represent a district covering western Long Island and a part of Queens. Put simply, this is one of those stories where the reporters check on the various elements of Santos’ inspiring American story and basically none of it checks out. There are the colleges he claimed to attend with no record of him, the investment banks he claimed to have worked at who have no record of his employment. Along the way there’s the criminal record in Brazil and the family real estate company that doesn’t appear to own any real estate. It just goes on and on. As I said, it’s one of those stories.

When I saw the headline I thought, wait, don’t I remember that name? Sure enough, almost exactly a year ago I wrote a couple posts about Santos’ pack of nonsensical tall tales. To be fair, the Times went into infinitely more depth. I was mainly focused on a gas price tale of woe he was pitching on social media. Santos explained how he was paying an insane amount of money putting gas in his car because of Joe Biden’s inflation. The problem was that his claimed spending required him to be logging at least 1,000 miles a week on a 15-mile commute. Needless to say, I found running those numbers irresistible and went to town on it.

I know we’ve been a bit Elon-centric here of late, but the latest developments should prompt us to look to some of the core challenges behind what we now call social media. The Musk saga is comparatively simple: a middle-aged buffoon on one-half midlife crisis, one-half power trip running roughshod over everything. But outside such extreme cases there are more basic challenges. The essence of the social media business proposition is to be the venue for literally everyone talking about everything while managing the venue through automated processes which keep the staff capacity and costs low. Put a different way, success means scale: revenues growing exponentially while costs grow arithmetically.

A minor point. But TPM Reader BR points out that that the private jet at the center of the latest Twitter fracas is not precisely Elon Musk’s. It appears to be a corporate jet owned by SpaceX, the space launch company which along with Tesla is one of two companies on which Musk’s fortune is based. (Unlike Tesla, SpaceX remains a private company.)

BR flagged this Business Insider article that notes that Musk’s fleet of three Gulfstream jets is owned and registered to a company called Falcon Landing LLC, which BI says is “a shell company with ties to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters.” The corporate listing for the shell corporation says it’s located at the same address as SpaceX and it’s agent and manager are also SpaceX. Among the corporation’s inactive directors and officers are SpaceX, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell (president and COO of SpaceX), along with the corporate service company.

You’ve likely seen a lot of write-ups about Elon Musk having a temper tantrum last night and banning a group of journalists. It’s gotten a lot of attention in part because he banned ones that were in some sense covering him and his acquisition of Twitter, and because he banned reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations in the country, including CNN, the Times and the Post. In most cases (it’s hard to know because there’s been no clear explanation of why any of this happened) the bans were based on tortured readings of a new rule Twitter put in place the night before based on a different temper tantrum on Wednesday. Perhaps fittingly enough for a neo-Gilded Age tale, the episode starts with Musk’s private jet, a 2015 Gulfstream G650.

On the issue of whether Trump is “done,” as I put it below, the primary itself really isn’t the question. There seems little doubt that another Republican could defeat Donald Trump for the nomination, though I’m skeptical of whether that person is Ron DeSantis. The more operative question is what you do with Trump after you beat him. Normally you have a primary battle and one candidate comes out on top. It may be a cakewalk or a brutal slog. But one candidate gets the most delegates and the others fall in behind that candidate.

It’s very difficult, though, to imagine Donald Trump losing a hard fought primary struggle and then just gracefully falling in line as a surrogate for the guy who beat him. In fact, it’s basically impossible to imagine that happening.

I’ve treated it as a given that Trump is the nominee in 2024 if he wants to be. But today’s “Major Announcement” from Trump, which ended up being a new set of NFT playing cards with Trump in a bulging Superman suit, crystalizes my growing doubts about whether he still has the juice to go another round. We’ve also seen a couple polls this week which show a clear majority of self-described Republican primary voters prefer Ron DeSantis over Trump, albeit with DeSantis continuing Trump’s policies. But polls can change. Nor does a poll more than a year out from the first primary capture all the kinetic dimensions of an actual primary battle. What is less changeable are the growing signs that Trump is just a loser.

One of the most bracing, bizarre aspects of Mark Meadows texts with members of Congress is the fact that many truly seemed to believe the most absurd claims and conspiracy theories. This wasn’t just red meat they were tossing out on Fox and Newsmax. They were saying this stuff, in earnest, in the privacy of text messages with longtime colleagues. But even this, I would say, isn’t the heart of the matter. There’s something else we see in the very first texts, before the TV networks called the race but when the writing was clearly on the wall. It can most easily be summarized as: Trump can’t be allowed to lose. On Nov. 6, 2020, Rep. Brian Babin tells Meadows that they “refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R) of South Carolina tells local press that his January 17th, 2021 call to place the United States under martial law to keep Trump in office — first reported yesterday by TPM — came from “frustration.”

One of the most consistent findings of years of audience research at TPM is that people in education and especially higher education (college and graduate) are our largest single audience. That’s certainly true of representation vs the population at large but it’s also true (though definitions became more complicated here) in absolute terms. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that the site was founded by a lapsed academic. But among many other things it means that there are quite a lot of physicists among you. And you’ve been helping me with lots of feedback about this fusion announcement apparently coming shortly from the Livermore Laboratory.

For the non-physicists and innumerate among you, everything I’ve heard confirms the gist of my second post on this from this morning: this is, unfortunately, not a game changer for the possible future of fusion as a source of population-level power generation. The key is to distinguish between two questions: a breakthrough achievement in scientific and engineering terms? Yes. A breakthrough in terms of fusion produced energy being any more part of your future than it was a week ago? No. Sadly, no. But still no.