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The country is deeply divided over what Elon Musk is doing in Washington, D.C., and by that, I don’t mean the Department of Government Efficiency, but the presence of a 4-year-old in the Oval Office.
Last week, Musk brought his son, X Æ A-Xii — not a typo — to a news conference where the child known as “Lil X” was either the most adorable boy you’ve ever seen, or an impudent monster, depending on what the algorithms served you on social media that day.
CNN called it a “humanizing moment” for Musk and said the child was “sharply dressed and well-behaved, yet still a child.”
“Case in point: He stuck his fingers in his father’s ear, wiggled around and at one point even picked his nose,” CNN’s Hadas Gold wrote.
There were even serious articles fact-checking what the 4-year-old appeared to say, and columns proposing insidious motives for Musk bringing X along.
In fact, the child has been a fixture at his father’s side, Walter Isaacson wrote in the biography “Elon Musk,” saying that Musk’s life was “transformed” by the birth of X in May 2020. “He took X everywhere,” Isaacson wrote. “He would sit on his father’s lap through long meetings, ride on his shoulders around the Tesla and SpaceX factories, wander precariously through solar roof installation sites, turn Twitter’s lounge areas into his playground, and chatter away in the background during late-night conference calls.”
Isaacson added: “He and his father would repeatedly watch rocket launch videos together, and he learned to count down from ten before he could count up from one.”
Musk has been pictured with the child on his shoulders visiting the Pantheon in Rome, meeting with former Hungarian President Katalin Novak and sitting together at the 2024 Super Bowl. He also showed up in a conversation between his father and Tucker Carlson. These are truly adorable images of a doting father and son, if you can overlook the more peculiar aspects of Musk’s fatherhood, to include three marriages which ended in divorce, and 12 children with unconfirmed reports of one more.
The child’s mother was among people who thought it inappropriate for X to be in the Oval Office, reportedly saying, “He should not be in public like this.” Others cheered the images, saying how great it is to see children in unexpected places, similar to Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, traveling together internationally with their three children.
Both can be true.
Musk himself seemed a bit frustrated as he wrangled his son, saying apologetically at one point, “Gravitas can be difficult sometimes.” Watching X demand to be picked up and then tousle his father’s hair and stick his fingers in his ears, I thought longingly of Captain von Trapp and his orderly parenting style, before he fell in love with Maria. But only for a moment.
The fact is, young Caroline Kennedy did handstands in the Oval Office as her father watched, and the nation loved seeing John Kennedy Jr. play under his father’s desk. Chelsea Clinton brought her cat, Socks, into the Oval Office (the cat once sat at the president’s desk), and Joe Biden brought his German shepherds. Sasha Obama hid behind a couch in the Oval Office while her father worked. These are among the most precious and memorable images taken in this dignified space. Maybe we don’t want a litter box in there, or a BRIO set for world leaders to trip over. But on occasion, sure, let children be children, even in hallowed places. And just as importantly, let dads be dads.
‘Trump trauma’ and the media
In their conversation for The New York Times this week, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens bantered about “Trump trauma,” with Stephens sharing what he found most troubling about the president’s latest actions, piling up with dizzying speed. (He answered: Trump’s invitation to Putin to visit the U.S., and dropping the charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Both, however, were in favor of “getting rid of pennies and paper straws.”)
It occurs to me that many of us are having the same conversation with friends and family members right now. The administration is dropping so many executive orders and proposing so many sweeping changes that it seems hard to find someone who would disagree with everything they’re doing, and even longtime opponents of Trump are having to grudgingly admit they like some of what he has done.
Writing for Columbia Journalism Review this week Jon Allsop noted that despite Trump’s famously contentious relationship with the press, “the media basher-in-chief” brought home an imprisoned journalist, Andrey Kuznechyk, in his first month in office, and he has shown interest in the case of Austin Tice, a journalist believed to still be held in Syria. The media bashing by Trump and his close associates notwithstanding, “... in the relatively narrow area of freeing unjustly imprisoned journalists overseas, the new administration does not seem, at least at first glance, to present much of a difference from its predecessor, and could even be perceived as an improvement in some ways,” Allsop wrote.
Of course, he notes, a hostage release is a huge win for Trump, regardless of who is being released, and the credit due may span administrations. It does seem a hopeful sign, however, that as people tick off their assorted “Trump traumas,” people are also finding things — even if they’re just little things — that they like. “Even never Trumpers are warming up to The Donald,” Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in The Epoch Times.
Quote of the Week
“When Trump’s party looks at the same ink blots, they see the Sistine Chapel. For them, this inspiring vision paints over the graffiti scrawled by the Biden administration. Of course, Democrats think Trump is doing the spray-painting. It is hard to imagine two more starkly different interpretations of American politics today. Average voters lie somewhere in the middle, but closer to the Republican view, according to recent polls.” — Charles Lipson writing for The Spectator on the Rorschach test that Trump 2.0 presents.
Recommended reading
Naomi Schaefer Riley reports on a disturbing new trend in drug use: “Teens should be enjoying their lives, and if in the past they used drugs because they wanted to see how much more enjoyment they could squeeze out of their social interactions, that’s a very different problem than teens using drugs to handle day-to-day living.”
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2025/02/16/fentanyl-use-girls-anxiety-depression/
Camille S. Williams examines the research behind the Trump administration cutting funding for gender medical care for minors: “Maybe God, Tennessee and Mr. Rogers got it right: the sexually dimorphic human body is a good in itself, an irreplaceable gift. Surely we ought to be able to teach that to our children.”
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2025/02/14/gender-care-medical-modification-minors-trump/
Judge Thomas B. Griffith says it’s fair game to criticize the decisions of judges, but it’s important to support the judiciary as an institution: “The renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, someone not given to exaggerated claims, warns of a ‘catastrophic failure of our democracy,’ because, he notes, ‘we just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all trust out of the system.’ Overheated rhetoric about the judges who are hearing challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive orders drains trust in our courts.”
https://www.deseret.com/politics/2025/02/17/support-the-federal-judiciary/
My latest
A few months ago, a friend shared that her daughter, not yet 25, had just been approved for a tubal ligation after a single doctor visit. She had been encouraged by friends celebrating their own sterilization. I looked into this and was surprised to find that this life-altering procedure is enabled by a medical industry that sees sterilization as a medically necessary — as opposed to elective — procedure. Here’s the story:
Why are young women opting to be sterilized?
Please send your story ideas and how you’re coping with NFL withdrawal (Jim Gaffigan suggests that we go to church) to Jgraham@deseretnews.com. Thank you for reading.