Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

A small update on the Cybertruck incident in Vegas, since I discussed it in today’s Backchannel. The 37-year-old active-duty soldier in the vehicle apparently shot himself in the head moments before the car ignited. He was also, according to his uncle, a big Trump supporter. Needless to say (or I hope it’s needless to say), this makes the motive for this incident pretty hard to make sense of. Given the apparent suicide and other outlandish parts of what happened it seems obvious that mental health issues likely played some role. But this goes a bit beyond making bad decisions or having a general suicidal ideation. Even in the context of some distorted reasoning, what was the message? What was the point? I’ve seen a number of people propose that the dead soldier may have been angry about Trump’s new fealty to Musk. On its face this struck me as the kind of over-ornate theory you’d come up with if you’re spending too much time on social media and had too much time on your hands. But the truth is I haven’t been able to come up with any more plausible theory.

It’s always good to remember that people who rent a car, drive it from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas and then light the car on fire and shoot themselvs in the head probably aren’t thinking in very linear ways or ways that are going to make sense to the rest of us. But it’s still pretty hard to figure.

We’re seeing a range of headlines today about the “MAGA civil war” centered on immigration policy. Is the point to put America to work for Americans (MAGA-coded “real Americans,” of course)? Or is it to open the flood gates for engineers from Bangalore and Taiwan to achieve maximum efficiency and the global dominance of Silicon Valley? Vivek Ramaswamy baldly went there with a long post arguing that you simply can’t staff Silicon Valley with native-born Americans because the country is mired in a “culture of mediocrity.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he continued. It’s worth reading because it distills a specific viewpoint, at least parts of which many people agree with and which has powerful backers in Silicon Valley.

But let me suggest that a “MAGA civil war” isn’t the right frame to understand any of this. MAGA of the 2024-25 era is more like an electoral machine built around Donald Trump. Itr runs very well. Who gets to run it and who does it work for? Good white folk from Middle America or the best and the brightest from South Asia? MAGA never really had core policies. It had impulses. A huge amount of canonical Trumpism, as it was articulated during the Biden years, was a raft of policies and goals that were little more than payback over the Mueller probe. With Trump now tired and on the way out, there’s an increasing free-for-all over who gets the keys. Musk? Bannon? Ramaswamy? The Project 2025 Heritage Crowd? JD Vance and Josh Hawley and anti-cat ladyism?

Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyering that would not only defend Trump’s self-proclaimed “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment but affirmatively take the fight to Trump and MAGA’s legal corruption and abuses of power. Today I want to return to that topic. There’s good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. Your mileage may vary.

Let’s start with the good news. There actually are some groups mobilizing to do this kind of defense. I’m not going to get into particulars or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment — but groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit or whatever other form the harassment or abuse it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It’s a more general effort to defend civil society. So perhaps it’s the immigrants rights group which is targeted by a state attorney general. Or it’s the independent press outlet being targeting by the federal or a state government or your run-of-the-mill billionaire. This is happening and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts to this end, but also umbrella operations getting commitments for pro-bono work from law firms and much else.

But there’s a catch. For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.

Here’s some Christmas Eve entertainment for you. By perhaps making Mike Johnson unelected as speaker (not a done deal but a real possibility), last week’s Trump/Elon drama may leave Republicans Jan. 6ing themselves this year this time. Ironic! This Roll Call article gets into the details. But the gist is that if they can’t elect Mike Johnson (or someone else) between January 3rd and 6th, they can’t properly constitute themselves to officially receive the electoral votes. There won’t be a properly constituted or sworn-in House, at least not in the way it’s been done for the couple centuries-plus. The Roll Call article makes clear there are probably workarounds, maybe, largely because the constitution leaves it to the House to make up its own rules. So the House can probably, maybe(?), make up a new rule to resolve the problem. But it won’t be pretty.

As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.