We Still Need Both Trump and Musk

It's mystifying to identify two more constructively transformational patriotic leaders in modern American history than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Each, independently and collaboratively, also has and continues to, impact global developments in numerous remarkable ways.

And yes, each additionally has individual visions and leverage to advance occasionally separate and divergent priorities.

Trumping All Odds:

Consider what former and current President Trump has accomplished having overcome unrelenting lawfare efforts to malign, bankrupt, incarcerate, and even by some, assassinate him, once again becoming the world's most powerful leader.

Restoration of Border Sovereignty: Honoring his popular election pledge, the Trump administration ended Biden open southern border policies that have literally invited a flood of unvetted illegal migrants including trafficked female and child sex slaves, violent gang members, criminal offenders and individuals on terrorist watch lists — along with tons of deadly fentanyl into our communities.

Winning War on Woke: Trump policies recognize and honor a constitutional guarantee of merit-based equality of opportunities for all rather than neo-Marxist equity of outcomes that exploit contrived racial and gender divide-and-conquer stereotypes institutionalized by DEI hiring and promotion policies and quotas to the detriment of organization performance and employee morale.

Freeing Enterprise Prosperity: Industry and individual business deregulation coupled with corporate investment and individual income tax relief feeds rather than starves the golden goose of government revenues essential to growing America's economy and protecting the solvency of entitlements, including earned Social Security and medical health insurance benefits.

Releasing Energy Bondage: Recognizing that abundant, affordable energy is the lifeblood of all healthy societies and that fossil sources provide more than 80% of the U.S. and world supply with electricity demand projected to grow dramatically to power massive AI data centers, the Trump administration has pledged to develop vast deposits of oil, natural gas, and cleanly processed coal with no replacement sources currently capable of fulfilling a huge and dangerous supply gap.

Defending Fair Trade: President Trump is taking strong positions in leveraging U.S. trading partners to be fair in not placing higher tariff costs on products they supply to us than we do on exports to them while, in the case of China in particular (a $-19.7 billion trade deficit), subsidizing their companies to enable them to undercut prices of ours at home while stealing technology and design innovations to avoid costly development expenses.

Global Peace Through Strength: Following four years of public uncertainty regarding who was making White House decisions for a conspicuously cognitively challenged president, the American electorate once again voted to return a bold leader of the nation and world at a time of pervasive economic and military threats posed by China, Russian assaults on Ukraine, and Iran-sponsored Middle East turmoil on the cusp of going thermonuclear against Israel and America.

Musk's Rich Contributions:

Elon Musk has become the world's wealthiest individual by striving to make it better for countless others … and he hasn't quit doing so.

Breaking Social Stranglehold on Free Speech: Musk's purchase of Twitter (now "X") for $44 billion with the expressed aim of turning it into a "town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated" offers an open social media platform for exchanges of opinions and information that have been suppressed by ideologically biased Big Tech companies including evidence of criminal behavior revealed on Hunter Biden's laptop and banning of communications from a nationally elected President Trump.

Global Starlink Impacts: Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system provides internet access to remote and underserved areas which has included services to rural communities lacking fiber optic cable networks, populations hit by natural disasters, Ukrainian forces as new areas were liberated, and outside life-saving communication consultations for a war-torn Gaza hospital.

SpaceX Innovation and Advancement: Musk's space innovations have rapidly achieved a series of remarkable milestones, including becoming the first private company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit and recover a spacecraft, to develop reusable rockets to conduct crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station, and to construct an enormous Starship spacecraft designed to carry humans to Mars as multi-planetary residents.

Tesla EV and Energy Initiatives: Back on Earth, Elon has revolutionized the electric vehicle industry, transforming his company over two decades from a fledgling start-up to a dominant auto producer that captured about 20% of the global EV market share in 2023.

Musk co-founded SolarCity with two cousins in 2006 which became the largest provider of solar energy services in the U.S. including solar panels and energy storage systems such as a Powerwall home battery, a Powerpack commercial-scale battery, and a Megapack designed for utility-scale installations.

Artificial Intelligence Safety: In 2015, Musk cofounded OpenAI, a research organization dedicated to prioritizing ethical safeguards by emphasizing a need for transparency, collaboration and proactive regulation to ensure that science doesn't create superintelligent capabilities that could pose a threat to human existence.

Exposure of Government Waste: One of Elon Musk's most immediate and perhaps most lasting accomplishments is to apply Silicon Valley-style technology, including AI and data science, to detect and publicly expose unproductive and fraudulent spending across all federal agencies offering unprecedented real-time transparency on a public website

As might be noted, while public frictions have erupted, there is little apparent daylight between the priorities of these two leaders — one the world's most governmentally powerful, the other the most entrepreneurially successful and wealthy.

All that really matters is that they each continue with exactly what they're doing to benefit all of us.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.