SADLY, BOTH TRUMP AND MUSK HAVE MADE A SOFT LANDING

The New Republic's story about Tesla's quarterly earnings report carries this headline:

Tesla Earnings Plunge Because Everyone Hates Elon Musk

TNR tells us:

Elon Musk’s far-right turn as the head of the Department of Efficiency has apparently tanked Tesla’s earnings.

In a humiliating first-quarter report published Tuesday, Tesla reported that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year.

The company vastly underperformed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for per-share profit, reporting an adjusted earnings-per-share of 27 cents, well below the expectations of 41 cents.

Sales slipped dramatically as well, dropping 13 percent from the same period last year.

But does that mean everyone hates Elon Musk? Apparently not, because as I write this, Tesla stock is up more than 7% in pre-market trading. This is why:

Elon Musk says he will step back next month from his work with the Department of Government Efficiency to focus more time on Tesla, after the electric carmaker's profits plunged 71%.

"Starting next month, I will be allocating far more of my time to Tesla," Musk announced during Tesla's earnings call Tuesday. "My time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly."

"I think I'll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it would be useful," added Musk, as he declared his work with DOGE "mostly done."

Many people don't hate Elon Musk categorically. They hate the fact that he's putting in so many hours working at DOGE, where he's alienating potential customers, rather than doing what they still believe he's good at, which is running his companies -- this despite the utter failure of the Cybertruck and the many missed deadlines on full self-driving, a lower-cost electric vehicle, and robotaxis, not to mention continually plunging revenues at X. Despite all the evidence that he's lost the plot, many people will go right back to regarding him as a genius and a visionary if he dials back his involvement in DOGE. And, of course, many people have never stopped believing in him.

This makes him very similar to Donald Trump, whose poll numbers have dropped since his second inaugural, declining notably after his tariff "Liberation Day," but have now apparently stopped their slide. According to Nate Silver's polling average, Trump's job approval slipped to 45.5% on April 10 -- but now it's a nearly identical 45.4%. At RealClearPolling, Trump's job approval number dropped to 46.7% on April 12 -- exactly where it is now. Markets are selling off U.S. bonds, trade deals aren't happening, Trump is defying the courts on deportations, Trump subordinates are obtaining or seeking access to personal data at an alarming rate, measles is rampant -- but 45% or more of the country either loves everything that's going on or has a few qualms but still trusts the plan. Much of America still can't quite believe that Trump is dangerous and untrustworthy, just as they can't quite accept that Musk is a charlatan, a Nazi, and a brain-poisoned whackjob.

This also seems analogous to the endless "Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?" coverage in the mainstream media. Those whose answer is "Not yet" apparently need to believe that we could return to normality at any moment, with laws prevailing and guardrails holding. They still want to believe this is normal politics, and I can't imagine what it will take to make them realize that we've been in a constitutional crisis since Inauguration Day.

Maybe a recession? Will that do it? I can imagine that Americans might turn against Trump for that most normie of reasons, but will never quite realize that he destroyed much of what was best about America, and did it illegally and unconstitutionally. They'll simply write him off because he didn't lower the price of eggs. And if we can still have elections and vote his party out of office, the GOP will be able to regroup after that and take a second run at destroying everything good about America, with a less ignorant, less idiotic dictator this time. We'll never have the necessary reckoning. We'll just go right back to treating the GOP as a normal politcal party.