By CLAIRE WINTER

You know, sometimes I miss the good old days. Technically, I’m not old enough to remember the “good old days, ” but you know what I’m talking about. Those wonderful days when all it took to make a politician reviled by the public was to have him connected to planting some bugs in an office. Okay, so that’s probably an oversimplification, but still, I would like to register my emphatic disapproval of the fact that you just can’t get politicians disliked by everyone anymore. Case in point: Has anyone looked at Elon Musk lately?

Yeah, we’re talking about the Nazi salute he did, on live TV, at a Trump rally. Good times to live in America, y’all. Great. Times. So, first and foremost, on everyone’s mind: was it actually a Nazi salute?

Yes. Anyone thinking otherwise needs to get their eyes checked, a talk about propaganda, and then- just maybe- some blunt-force brain calibration. 

What’s truly remarkable about the veritable hurricane of excuses going on around the enigmatically nicknamed “arm gesture” and the reasoning behind it is that nobody can seem to keep their stories straight around why, exactly, Mr. Musk decided that it would be a good idea to perform the aforementioned arm gesture. So let’s break it down for you.

1. It’s a “Roman Salute”. 

Okay, so technically- TECHNICALLY- yes, it is. The gesture is credited to the ancient Romans- although with no real historical evidence for it being a thing the Romans ever did- and was popularized first by the French revolutionaries and then by Mussolini before Hitler ever got his grubby little fingers in it. Such a salute probably never existed in actual ancient Rome, and even if it did? At this point, it’s so thoroughly mired in not one but two fascist regimes that you’d think, among other things, a lawyer would discourage you from doing it in any public setting. And also in private, because if you’re doing it in private, that seems like something you should go have a life crisis about. 

2. “He’s autistic and didn’t understand what he was doing.”

Here are- just for laughs- a few little fun factoids for you. According to the WHO, 1 in 100 children is autistic. There are somewhere around, give or take a few tens of millions, ~300 million people in the US of A. This means that you have, almost certainly, met someone who has autism before. Now, a hypothesis. Did any of those people, by chance, start doing a Nazi salute? Any of them? “I have autism” is neither an excuse nor an argument for being a bigot, and honestly, the whole idea that autistic people can neither understand the repercussions of their actions nor take responsibility for them is ludicrous. And if Musk truly didn’t understand what his salute meant- a fact I, for one, doubt so heavily I don’t have an appropriate adjective for it- and could not be coached by the overworked members of the White House PR team to at least not do it in public, should he be in government in the first place? The answer is no. 

3. Musk was “giving his heart out to the people”.

Really? Didn’t seem like it to me. The impression I got was more like “oh wow, this guy who was in no way elected to the position he currently holds is now showing the whole world that he can do whatever he wants on the US stage without repercussions.” The Holocaust is required teaching in 23 states, Wisconsin and Illinois being two of them, so at the very least I expect most of the people reading this to have seen the photos of people, circa 1930s Germany, with their right arms raised and swastikas in the background. You can make a heart with your hands. The only reason you’d do a Nazi salute to “give your heart out to the people” is just that you wanna do a Nazi salute. 

4. “It was a clumsy gesture.”

Oh, whoops, dropped my coffee cup and did a Nazi salute, my bad, happens to all of us, you know how it goes. Whoops, gestured too hard in a really weird and very deliberate way at my friend and then turned around and did it to all of my other friends. Obviously on accident! 

Besides being a despicable move to make for Musk and Trump’s general cabinet, this event is probably a signpost for how the next four years under Trump may play out. Already, DOGE (you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, I guess), Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” is starting to grind away at safety nets. Recently, Musk reported that his department had fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as well as intentions to target funding for other government agencies. Between this, Trump’s stated hopes to enter Gaza, and the ongoing tariff situations between the US, China, Mexico and Canada, there hasn’t been a whole lot of time for people to even process everything that Trump and his administration plan to do. It’s not entirely surprising that the general US citizen has more on their mind. However, there is a rule I recommend keeping in mind for all of us out there living through these…interesting…times: the only good Nazi is a dead one. 

Featured Image: POLITICO.eu