Elon Musk, generational trauma and the "Get over it" presidency

We will never not long for what might have been.

Vicente Cutanda - A los pies del Salvador — Slaughter of the Jews in the Middle Ages (Wikimedia)

Sometime in the early 1970s, not long after dictator Francisco Franco lifted restrictions on travel to Spain, my mother and father, who were divorced, each separately booked travel to the country.

They were born in Turkey and were fluent in Turkish and in the languages of their adopted homeland, Canada – English and French – but their mother tongue was Ladino, the Jewish dialect of Spanish.

They wanted to explore a country whose language spilled out of their mouths like ambrosia but which they had never traveled, knew, seen, smelled, tasted – the country from which their ancestors were expelled 500 years earlier. .

They each came back with stories about speaking their native language for the first time in its native land, of interlocutors identifying their accent to a certain region. (I regret not remembering where.) They both loved Spain. My joke with my mother was that if I ever got rich I would buy her a home in Palma de Mallorca.

In my family, the massacre, torture and ethnic cleansing of Jews starting in 1492 remained with us. It shaped my parents. It shaped me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A term for this effect is generational trauma. It burrows so deep that research suggests it has an effect on one’s genetic makeup.

Elon Musk thinks it needs to stop. “Eventually the passing on of generational trauma must end,” he said on Feb. 14 on Twitter, the platform he purchased and which he now calls X.

“Must” end is interesting – Musk has purchased plenty of power as the director/enabler/facilitator, whatever he is as of this afternoon, of the Department of Government Efficiency. He’s upending plenty of lives, for sure, but I don’t think he has the power to wipe out collective memory.

Yet. In fact, he and President Donald Trump appear to be careening toward events which occasion generational trauma.

There’s a lot to unpack in his two tweets. They were prompted by a lawsuit filed in a federal court by Norm Eisen and other lawyers arguing that the gutting of the government undertaken by Musk and DOGE is unconstitutional.

“You and Marc Elias are undermining civilization,” Musk told Eisen, naming another lawyer who has filed separate lawsuits seeking to limit the scope of DOGE. “Did you guys suffer childhood trauma or something? This seems like a generational trauma transfer issue.”

Replying to a tweeter who said Eisen and Elias were “touched” i.e., molested, Musk added, “When someone who is supposed to care for you does you wrong, that breaks most people, but eventually the passing on of generational trauma must end.”

Before I get to what most exercises me about Musk’s replies, let’s list the manifold ways the at least second most powerful man in the United States demonstrates a lack of seriousness:

–Musk does not address the substance of Eisen’s argument. Instead he attacks him personally.

–Musk is belittling those who suffer mental anguish because of trauma, suggesting they are incapable of rational thought. His claims are of course unsubstantiated (I know Eisen, and he had a pretty wonderful childhood). But his dismissive diagnosis marginalizes and delegitimizes anyone with emotional or mental difficulties (they’re “broken”.) Which is extraordinary considering how frequently Musk and his defenders invoke his self-diagnosed (i,.e., never actually diagnosed) autism to defend his actions.

What exercises me most, naturally, is the Jewish subtext to Musk’s tirade. He begins by accusing Eisen and Elias of “undermining civilization,” which is an antisemitic trope spanning millennia and ideologies. And he suggests that it is because of “generational trauma transfer.”

What Eisen and Elias have in common, aside from being Democrats and lawyers, is that they are Jewish. No one is born a Democrat or a lawyer; what Musk means by “generational trauma” is their Jewishness.

What he’s telling us is to “Get over it”, which slots in nicely with his endorsement of far- right parties in Europe, including the neo-Nazi rooted AfD in Germany. “There is too much focus on past guilt,” Musk told the party last month.

“Get over it” is in effect what Vice President J.D. Vance told Europe last week. Trump’s second presidency, seeking to strip from American memory slavery, Jim Crow, the agonies of Native Americans, the treatment of immigrants, might as well be called the “Get over it” presidency. Ukraine needs to “get over” the land Russia stole from it. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s prescription for the Palestinians is pretty much: “Get over Gaza”. Let’s see how that works out.

“Get over it” is apparently is the lesson Musk took away from his visit to Auschwitz, and belies his Jewish defenders who say the fact of his visiting the site of the death camp clears him of any animus toward Jews. (It seems to have deepened the animus.)

Elias in a letter to Musk directly addressed the Jewish subtext. “I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant,” he wrote. “I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump.”

I called Eisen, who has written poignantly about how his mother’s survival of the Holocaust has shaped him, but he would not go there: He did not want to discuss any Jewish subtext to Musk’s tweets, and said only that he would not be deterred.

“His tweets are hardly going to dissuade us,” he said. “I take them as a backhanded compliment and as an encouragement to litigate even more where the constitution is at stake in his contact” with the government.

“Get over it” is a message that Israel’s leadership, so smitten with Musk and Trump, might do well to discern. As Trump’s Middle East plans take shape, Israel’s own traumas will not be exempt from the “Get over it” directive.

Israel will not soon recover from the trauma of Oct. 7, nor should it. It peopled every conversation I had when I was there earlier this month and it stood guard in the faces of the photos of every fallen Nova celebrant flapping gently in the breeze at the site of the dance festival.

Israel is bracing this week for the return of the bodies of the youngest of the hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, which will be unbearable, but will necessarily be unforgettable. “Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed,” Seth Mandel wrote this week in The Free Press.

The longing for what might have been, the sacred absences created by lives lost and lives not lived, the empty rooms we furnish with our dreams are not a disability. They are a strength. They will never end.